•Ml 


TE-BOOK 


Wm.  D.  O'CONNOR 


THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


iSoolifi  on  tl)e 
^[)ali€epcarc=-iSncon  (!Dontro\)crsp. 

THE  PROMUS  OF  FORMULARIES  AND  ELE- 
GANi-  lES  (being  Private  Notes  in  MS.  circa  1594, 
hitherto  unpublished).  By  Francis  Bacon.  Il- 
lustrated and  elucidated  by  Passages  from  Shake- 
speare, by  Mrs.  Henry  Pott.  With  a  Preface  by 
E.  A.  Abbott.  D.  D.,  Head-Master  of  London 
School.     8vo,  ))S5.oo. 

THE  AUTHORSHIP  OF  SHAKESPEARE.  By  Na- 
thaniel HoLMRs.  With  an  Appendix  of  addi- 
tional matters,  including  a  rotice  of  the  recently 
discovered  Northumberland  MSS.,  etc.,  etc.  New 
edition,  much  enlarged.  In  two  volumes,  crown 
8vo,  gilt  top,  $4.00. 

HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  By  Wiluam  D.  O'Con- 
nor.    Crown  8vo,  ;^i.oo. 

HOUGHTON,  MIFFLIN  &  CO. 
Boston  and  New  York. 


HAMLET'S   NOTE-BOOK 


BY 


WILLIAM   D.  O'CONNOR 


Mfrpfffiffirfi  rrrrj-|-^,  |      ^  ^J 


BOSTON  AND   NEW  YORK 
HOUGHTON,  MIFFLIN   AND   COMPANY 
(SLhe  OiUcreiDe  Prcas',  «jranilriEiflc 
1886 


Copyright,  1886, 
By  Wn.LIAM   D.  O'CONNOR. 

All  rights  reserved. 


The  Riverside  Press,  Cambridge  f 
Electrotyped  and  Printed  by  H.  0.  Houghton  &  Co. 


ijr 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 


It  is  a  serious  question  whetKer  reviews  are 
of  any  real  advantage  to  literature.  They  cer- 
tainly tend  to  prevent  its  direct  operation  upon 
the  public  mind,  substituting  for  consideration, 
instead  of  the  book  itself,  an  account  of  it  by 
some  more  or  less  competent  critic.  This  ac- 
count is  almost  sure  to  be  partial,  inadequate,  or 
incorrect,  and  is  often  disparaging  or  hostile. 
Worst  of  all,  it  can  be  so  moulded  as  to  deter 
the  reader  from  any  examination  of  the  work 
noticed,  which  may  yet  be  of  exceeding  value. 
One  remembers  the  fate  of  those  exquisite  early 
essays  of  Emerson,  —  shelved  at  the  bookseller's 
for  years  by  the  might  of  critical  verdicts  such 
as  would  never  have  emanated  from  the  reading 
public  at  large.)  Doubtless  much  that  is  valid 
can  be  said  in  favor  of  the  reviewing  system. 
But  however  this  may  be,  we  cannot  help  feeling 
an  angry  disgust,  and  the  disposition  to  have  the 
whole  thing  blown  to  limbo,  when  we  see,  as  we 
do  frequently,  a  book  of  signal  merit  intercepted 
on  its  way  to  the  public,  given  a  bad  name  in 
advance,  and  its  recognition  hindered  and  per- 


982978 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 


haps  absolutely  prevented,  by  tlie  plausible  mis- 
statements of  some  individual,  gifted  with  a 
certain  knack  at  composition,  who  holds  a  place 
of  vantage  in  a  widely  circulated  journal  or  mag- 


azine. 


These  remarks  bear  relevancy  to  a  transac-^ 
tion  in  which  the  late  Richard  Grant  White  ap- 
pears as  the  principal  figure.  About  two  years 
ago,  the  Pro77ms  of  Lord  Bacon,  a  manuscript 
previously  unpublished,  was  issued  in  print  by 
Mrs.  Henry  Pott,  of  London,  England.  The 
sentences  which  compose  the  work  were  illus- 
trated and  elucidated  by  copious  citations  from 
Shakespeare,  and  the  whole  prefaced,  and  it  may 
be  truly  said,  illuminated,  by  a  lucid  and  nobly- 
reasoned  commentary  from  the  pen  of  the  ed- 
itor. Lnmediately  upon  its  reproduction  in  this 
country,  it  was  reviewed  by  Mr.  White  in  the 
Atlantic  Monthly,  and  whoever  wants  to  see  a 
bold  specimen  of  the  diversified  arts  and  meth- 
ods by  which  a  work  of  great  and  permanent 
value  can  be  fatally  prejudiced  with  the  public, 
will  find  one  here  ready  to  his  hand.  The  vol- 
ume had  been  widely  heralded  before  publication 
as  an  important  contribution  to  the  literature  of 
the  Bacon-Shakespeare  inquiry,  and  much  was 
expected  from  it.  But  when  the  public  jour- 
nals, influenced  by  Mr.  White's  reputation  as  a 
Shakespearean  scholar,  had  spread  his  represen- 
tations far  and  wide,  and  it  had  become  known 
that  so  eminent  a  Shakespearean  authority  had 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  5 

pronounced  the  book  in  effect  mere  crank-work, 
apparently  making  his  assertions  good  through 
pages  of  derision  and  contemptuous  abuse,  the 
desire  even  to  look  at  it  was  extinguished.  In 
brief,  a  wide-spread  impression  having  been  cre- 
ated against  it  beforehand  as  a  piece  of  mere 
folly  and  insanity,  it  fell  stricken  in  its  course 
without  even  having  had  the  chance  to  get  into 
circulation,  and  be  judged  upon  its  merits. 

It  would  be  difficidt  to  convey,  even  to  the 
most  candid  and  receptive  mind,  an  adequate 
sense  of  the  distressing  wrong  such  actions  in- 
volve. In  this  case,  the  book  had  been  the 
fruit  of  toil  not  easily  conceivable.  Judging  by 
the  fac-simile  presented  in  the  volume,  the  man- 
uscrij)t  of  the  Promus  is  extremely  obscure,  and 
the  mere  task  of  deciphering  it  for  publication 
was  in  itself  one  to  shrink  from.  This  was  suc- 
ceeded by  tho  formidable  labor  of  fixing  upon 
the  meaning  of  a  mass  of  notes  which  are  truly 
phonographic  in  their  quality.  Then  followed 
the  still  more  onerous  task  of  hunting  out  from 
Shakespeare  the  host  of  passages  which  bear 
correspondence  of  one  kind  or  another  with  the 
Baconian  entries.  Incident  to  these  efforts,  with 
the  object  of  proving  that  certain  locutions, 
turns  of  expression,  verbal  uses,  etc.,  found  in 
the  Promus,  originated  with  Bacon,  was  the  pe- 
rusal of  over  six  thousand  volumes  of  the  liter- 
ature of  the  period.  In  addition  was  the  prep- 
arati(ni   of  a   number  of   appendices,   admirable 


6  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

for  research  and  critical  acuteness,  and  the  com- 
position of  the  noble  introduction  before  re- 
ferred to.  Imagine,  now,  that  at  length  the 
protracted  work  has  reached  its  close  and  the 
volume  is  issued.  In  an  hour,  so  to  speak,  it 
is  ruined,  and  the  labor,  the  anxious  care  and 
thought  of  years,  are  brought  to  nothingness. 

I  thought  that  when  a  book,  and  such  a  book, 
could  be  thus  dealt  with,  it  was  high  time  to 
review  the  reviewer,  and  immediately  after  the 
appearance  of  Mr.  White's  article  I  wrote  sub- 
stantially what  is  contained  in  these  pages,  and 
offered  it  for  publication.  After  considerable 
delay,  consequent  upon  the  determination  of  cer- 
tain periodicals  never  to  allow  anything  on  the 
Baconian  side  of  the  question  to  appear  in  print, 
my  contribution  was  accepted  by  a  leading  maga- 
zine and  held  for  publication.  But  pending  its 
appearance,  Mr.  White  died. 

This,  I  felt,  ended  all.  I  withdrew  the  manu- 
script, and  was  sadly  content  to  let  the  matter 
go.  But  it  appears  that  Mr.  White  had  been  of 
another  mind.  His  literary  executors  have  now 
put  forth  a  posthumous  volume,  consisting  of 
nine  of  his  essays,  and  among  them,  to  my  indig- 
nant surprise,  carefully  revised  for  publication 
by  his  own  hand,  I  find  the  review  from  the 
Atlantic  Monthly.  It  seems,  therefore,  that  he 
had  intended  to  give  this  injurious  article  all  the 
perpetuity  book-form  can  confer. 

Under  these  circumstances,  there  can  be  no 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  7 

reason  for  restraining  just  criticism.  On  the 
contrary,  the  performance  becomes,  more  than 
ever,  a  proper  object  for  thorough  exposure. 

It  was  always  a  matter  for  regret  and  censure 
that  Mr.  White's  writings  should  be  less  notice- 
able for  their  obvious  merits  than  for  their  fre- 
quent suffusions  of  supercilious  insolence.  In 
the  review  under  notice,  the  illustrations  of  this 
trait  are  copious.  A  leading  instance  is  the  title 
— "  The  Bacon-Shakespeare  Craze."  The  Ba- 
conian theory  the  reviewer  politely  terms  "  a  lit- 
erary bee  in  the  bonnets  of  certain  ladies  of 
both  sexes ;  "  "  as  to  treating  the  question  seri- 
ously, that  is  not  to  be  done  by  men  of  common 
sense  and  moderate  knowledge  of  the  subject ; " 
and  he  recommends  with  contemptuous  jocosity 
that  all  persons  convinced  of  the  Baconian  source 
of  the  Shakespeare  drama  should  be  carried  off 
to  mad-houses.  For  the  very  travesty  of  arro- 
gance, this  makes  one  think  of  Sim  Tappertit 
posing  as  the  Czar  of  all  the  Russias.  If  there 
was  ever  a  man  between  John  0' Groat's  and 
Land's  End  who  was  the  incarnation  of  solid 
British  common  sense,  it  was  Lord  Palmerston, 
and  Lord  Palmerston  believed  that  Bacon  wrote 
the  Shakespeare  plays.  Therefore,  according  to 
Mr.  White,  he  should  have  been  trundled  off 
to  Bedlam !  Not  long  ago,  Sir_Patrick^Cx)l- 
quhoun,  an  eminent  British  publicist,  read  a  pa- 
per advocating  the  Baconian  theory  before  the 
Royal  Society  of   Literature   at  London,  which 


8  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

was  respectfully  received  and  an  urgent  request 
made  by  the  Fellows  of  the  Society  for  its  publi- 
cation. He,  too,  according  to  Mr.  White,  should 
be  locked  up  with  the  lunatics.  We  have  gener- 
ally thought  that  no  sounder  mind  has  adorned 
the  annals  of  our  journalism  than  James  Wat- 
son Webb  of  the  Coiirie?'  and  IlJnqu'u^e?',  but 
it  would  seem  a  mistake,  for  he  held  that  Ba- 
con was  the  author  of  the  Shakespeare  drama. 
There,  too,  is  Judge  Holmes  of  Missouri,  for- 
merly a  law  lecturer  at  Harvard,  a  man  of  emi- 
nence on  the  Western  bench,  whose  book  on  the 
subject  a  true  Shakespearean  could  more  easily 
misrepresent  than  answer ;  there  also  is  Mr.  Ap- 
pleton  Morgan,  sound-minded  enough  to  be  the 
attorney  of  a  great  corporation  and  the  author  of 
several  legal  works,  whose  Shakesj^eare  Myth, 
which  Shakespeare  himself,  knowing  all  the  facts, 
could  not  have  confuted,  has  received  the  sig- 
nal honor  of  translation  into  German  by  Dr. 
Karl  Miiller  of  Stuttgart  and  publication  by  the 
great  house  of  Brockhaus  ;  and  there  are  two 
of  the  jiidges^  of  the  S_upreme  Court  of  the 
United  States,  well  understood  in  private  circles 
as  having  long  given  their  adhesion  to  the  Ba- 
conian theory  —  one  of  them  the  finest  legal  and 
judicial  mind  in  the  country,  some  of  his  de- 
cisions even  recalling  the  masculine  breadth,  the 
grasp  of  principle,  the  lucidity  and  comprehen- 
siveness of  Marshall.  And  yet  Mr.  White  could 
talk  about  mad-houses ! 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  9 

Of  course,  having  set  down  men  of  such  dis- 
tinction as  crazy,  no  wonder  that  this  meek  and 
lowly  philosopher,  under  the  guidance  of  his  rul- 
ing passion  for  insult,  should  not  have  treated 
Mrs.  Pott  or  her  book  with  common  decency. 
From  first  to  last,  both  lady  and  volume  are 
veiled  with  a  whirling  shower  of  disdainful  epi- 
thets and  adjectives,  of  which  "  ridiculously  ab- 
surd," "  absurdity,"  "  foolish  fuss,"  "  amazing 
assertion,"  "  amazing  inference,"  "  frantic  fancy," 
"  extreme  of  ignorance,"  and  "  staring  inej^tness 
and  puerility,"  are  quotable  specimens.  Amidst 
this  objurgatory  bobbery,  injurious  remarks  are 
thrown  in  from  time  to  time  like  projectiles. 
"  It  seems  very  strange  to  be  obliged  to  treat 
such  fancies  with  a  semblance  of  respect,"  sadly 
observes  the  tormentor  in  one  place.  In  another 
he  declares  that  "  Mrs.  Pott's  Book  may  not  be 
treated  with  patience,  hardly  with  decorum." 
And  at  the  outset,  he  sneeringly  alludes  to  Miss 
Delia  Bacon  and  Mrs.  Pott  as  "  rival  female  crit- 
ics"  to  "the  lady  of  the  last  century  who  de- 
cided  that  it  was  Ben  Jonson  who  '  wrote  Shik- 
spiir7 "  his  zeal  for  insult  here  leading  him  into 
the  smallness  of  deliberate  inaccuracy.  The 
allusion  is  to  the  amusing  farce  of  Garrick's 
friend,  the  Rev.  Mr.  Townley,  High  Life  Be- 
low Stairs,  in  which  the  fun  turns  upon  the  ser- 
vants taking  the  titles  of  their  respective  masters 
and  mistresses,  and  aping  the  manners  of  the 
London  nobility,  —  a  style  of  performance  which 


10  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

the  dudes  of  our  society  and  literature  have  since 
faithfully  continued.    The  passage  is  as  follows  : 

Lady  Bab.     Shikspur.     Did  you  never  read  Shikspiir  ? 
Sir  Harry.    I  never  heard  of  it. 

Kitty.    Shikspur  —  Shikspur  I     Who  wrote  it  ?     No,  I  never 
read  Shikspur. 

Lady  Bah.    Then  you  have  an  immense  pleasure  to  come. 

Duke.    Shikspur  !     Who  wrote  it  ? 

Sir  Harry.    Who  wrote  it  ?     Why,  Ben  Jonson. 

Duke.    Oh  I  remember.     It  was  KoUy  Kibber. 

So  it  was  not  "  a  lady  of  the  last  century,"  but 
a  gentleman  of  the  last  century,  who  decided 
that  Ben  Jonson  "  wrote  Shikspur."  But  in  his 
eagerness  to  aifront  Mrs.  Pott,  what  wonder 
that  the  critic  should  have  been  disregardful  of 
a  mere  minor  fact  of  history  ! 

His  feeling  and  mannerly  reference  to  Miss 
Bacon  as  "  loony,"  later  in  the  article,  is  quite 
in  keeping  with  the  general  performance.  But 
the  coarse  gibe  flung  upon  the  grave  of  the 
splendid  sibyl  is  little  to  the  treatment  she  re- 
ceived~in  her  life,  in  which  Mr.  White,  in  this 
article,  vaunts  his  active  participation.  She  had 
the  misfortune  to  arrive  at  conclusions  respect- 
ing the  authorship  of  the  Shakespeare  drama 
identical  with  those  entertained  by  the  strong- 
brained  British  premier,  and  this  it  appears  led 
Mr.  White  to  endeavor  to  persuade  her  publisher 
that  she  was  insane.  He  had  recently  issued 
his  Shakespeare's  Scholar,  and  had  his  fidl  lit- 
erary reputation  and  standing  to  enforce  and 
sustain  the  effort.     It  failed,  however,  in  so  far 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  11 

that  it  did  not  prevent  the  appearance  in  Put- 
ncmi's  Magazine  of  the  introductory  chapter  of 
the  work,  which  Miss.  Bacon  had  arranged,  ere 
her  departure  for  England,  to  have  serially  pub- 
lished in  the  magazine.  Strenuous  "  literary  " 
pressure,  in  which  Mr.  White  was  prominent, 
was  then  brought  to  bear,  Mr.  Putnam  yielded, 
and  the  publication  was  abruptly  discontinued, 
leaving  Miss  Bacon  at  the  greatest  disadvantage 
before  the  public,  her  introductory  article  hav- 
ing been  just  enough  to  arouse  virulent  opposi- 
tion, without  satisfying  awakened  curiosity.  The 
next  event  was  the  loss,  under  circumstances 
which  I  consider  highly  sinister,  of  the  manu- 
script, which  had  cost  her  the  labor  of  a  num- 
ber of  years.  The  reader  can  imagine  the  effect 
of  the  news  of  these  calamities  upon  a  nature  so 
intense  and  sensitive  as  hers.  But  for  some  who 
are  dead  and  cannot  answer  for  themselves,  and 
some  who  are  living  and  deserve  consideration, 
I  would  like  to  publish  her  letters,  which  Haw- 
thorne gave  me,  that  I  might  show  the  further 
distresses  heaped  upon  her  in  a  far  country, 
where  she  still  bravely  strove  to  recover  ground, 
and  toiled  at  her  book,  often  without  food  or 
fire.  These  were  the  experiences,  to  one  stage 
of  which  Mr.  White  parades  his  contribution, 
which  at  last  broke  a  heart,  already  sorely 
bruised  by  a  great  private  sorrow,  and  overthrew 
a  noble  and  most  sovereign  reason.  The  book 
when  it  appeared,  despite  its  unanswerable  truth, 


12 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 


J 


> 


its  eloquence,  its  frequent  splendid  sentences,  its 
marvellous  sweeps  of  intuition,  showed  the  ruin 
that  had  been  wrought  upon  her  mind,  and  gave 
Mr.  White  the  right  to  cast  his  bit  of  insulting 
slang  upon  her  tomb.  The  tale  was  once  too 
sad  for  tears.  But  it  all  matters  little  now. 
Though  her  work  proved  to  be  a  document  in 
madness,  the  madness  was  of  that  proud  kind  to 
which,  as  Dryden  reminds  us,  great  intellects  are 
allied  nearly,  and  the  volume,  as  Emerson  said  I 
of  it,  "  has  opened  the  subject  so  that  it  can  I 
never  again  be  closed." 

Why  the  reviewer  should  have  tried  to  close 
it  is  a  question,  inasmuch  as  he  profusely  de- 
clares in  his  article  that  it  is  a  matter  of  perfect 
indifference  to  him  whether  Bacon  or  Shake- 
speare wi'ote  the  plays,  —  a  declaration  which 
manifestly  leaves  his  composition  without  any 
adequate  motive.  But  he  even  pushes  his  stulti- 
fication so  far  as  to  wish  that  it  mio-ht  be  deci- 
sively  proved  that  the  drama  came  from  Lord 
Bacon,  forgetting  that  such  a  denouement  would 
have  put  him  in  a  nice  position,  after  having 
showered  all  sorts  of  contempt  and  ridicule  on 
Mrs.  Pott,  and  called  her  a  fool  and  an  iofnora- 
mus  for  having  ventured  in  her  modest  and  can- 
did way  to  consider  Lord  Bacon  the  author.  It 
is  perfectly  immaterial,  he  continues,  to  know 
whether  Bacon  or  Shakespeare  wrote  the  plays, 
and  no  doubt  this  profound  man  would  have 
thought  it  perfectly  immaterial  to  know  whether 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  13 

Judas  Iscariot  or  St.  John  wrote  the  Fourth  Gos- 
pel. Bacon  says  (echoed  as  usual  by  Shake- 
speare), "  the  tunes  give  great  Hght  to  true  in- 
terpretations," and  even  Mr.  White  might  have 
conceived  that  we  get  as  much  light  to  the  true 
interpretation  of  a  book  from  a  knowledge  of 
the  sort  of  man  who  wrote  it.  Did  he  imag- 
ine that  if  Bacon  were  found  to  be  the  true 
Shakespeare,  and  the  drama  were  put  into  col- 
lateral relation  with  him  and  his  philosophy,  it 
would  not  open  up  at  once  in  new  reaches  of 
signification  ?  Did  he  forget  that  its  philosophic 
and  artistic  character  and  all  its  rich  and  lofty 
import  were  obscured  for  nearly  a  century  by  its 
merely  being  attributed  to  William  Shakespeare, 
his  vulgar  and  commonplace  record  having  nat- 
urally limited  the  interpretation?  Really  it  is 
of  some  importance,  no  matter  what  any  Sir  Ora- 
cle may  say,  that  we  should  know  what  man, 
and  what  manner  of  man,  wrote  "  Shikspur  "  ! 

Mrs.  Pott's  edition  of  the  "  Promus,"  which 
Mr.  White's  review  approaches  through  these 
and  similar  outward  limbs  and  flourishes,  is  pre- 
liminary to  a  larger  work,  on  which  she  has  been 
engaged  for  years,  to  prove  Bacon's  authorship 
of  the  plays,  by  showing  in  almost  every  depart- 
ment of  knowledge  and  opinion  the  Verulamian 
mind  in  the  Shakespearean  writings.  The  title, 
Promus,  signifies  here  a  storehouse  of  mate- 
rials for  literary  use,  the  manuscript  being  sim- 
ply a  transcript  of  one  of  Bacon's  note-books, 


14  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

dated  1594/  and  containing  over  sixteen  hun- 
dred entries  of  isolated  words,  phrases,  Bible 
texts,  sentences  from  Latin  poets,  and  proverbs 
or  adages  in  several  languages.  Hamlet  de- 
scribes it  with  comprehensive  felicity.  It  is  one 
of  those  tablets  to  which  he  likens  his  memory. 
Here  are  all  such  entries  as  he  mentions,  — 

all  trivial  fond  records, 
All  saws  of  books,  all  forms,  all  pressures  past, 
That  youth  and  observation  copied  there. 

As  a  study  of  Bacon's  mental  methods,  at  least 
in  his  earlier  life,  the  book  is  invaluable.  It  is 
noteworthy  that  very  few  of  the  entries  are  used 
in  his  acknowledged  writings,  and  it  cannot  be 
gainsaid  that  a  great  number  of  them,  what- 
ever be  the  explanation,  do  appear  in  some  form, 
more  or  less  direct,  in  the  Shakespeare  plays. 
The  second  clause  of  this  statement  Mr.  White 
would  scout,  but  it  is  exceedingly  remarkable 
that  while  he  is  very  stiff  in  denying  that  the 
Promus  notes  appear  in  any  shape  in  the  sen- 
tences from  Shakespeare  Mrs.  Pott  has  attached 
to  them,  he  does  not  at  all  deny  that  the  mi- 
nority referred  to  do  really  appear  in  the 
works  of  Bacon,  although  the  manner  of  their 
use  is  the  same  in  one  case  as  the  other  !  No 
wonder  that  in  another  part  of  the    article  he 

1  Since  the  publication  of  the  Promus,  i\Irs.  Pott  has  found 
reason  to  believe  that  a  number  of  the  entries  were  made  at 
least  ten  years  prior  to  1594,  though  this  date  appears  on  some 
of  the  folios. 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  15 

should  consider  "  Consistency  thou  art  a  jewel  " 
a  foolish  saying. 

An  equal  proof  of  his  intrinsic  incapacity  for 
dealing  with  the  subject,  not  to  speak  of  his 
ignorance  thereof,  is  furnished  by  his  ludicrous 
perplexity  in  regard  to  the  uses  of  Bacon's 
Promus.  He  peevishly  calls  it  in  one  place 
"  the  dust  and  sweepings  of  his  study ; "  con- 
fesses in  another  that  "  why  Bacon  wrote  down 
phrases  like  this,  here  and  elsewhere,  seems  inex- 
plicable ;  "  and  appears  generally  badly  bothered 
by  the  memoranda.  Quite  needlessly,  one  would 
think.  The  matter  is  simple  enough.  In  the 
instance  of  the  "  phrases  "  Avhich  he  finds  "  in- 
explicable," they  are  obviously  notes  for  forms 
of  expression  which  Bacon  proposes  to  use  in 
literature,  and  they  appear  again  in  Shakespeare. 
A  certain  number  of  the  entries  are  jottings  of 
this  or  a  similar  description.  Others  were  prob- 
ably, as  Spedding  thought,  connected  in  Bacon's 
mind  with  certain  trains  of  meditation.  Gen- 
erally, the  rationale  of  the  notes  is  clearly  dis- 
closed by  Bacon  himself  in  the  Advancement 
of  Learning.  All  invention,  he  holds,  is  but  a 
kind  of  mem.ory,  and  the  use  of  notes  is  "  out 
of  the  knowledge  whereof  our  mind  is  already 
possessed,  to  draw  forth,  or  call  before  us,  that 
which  may  be  pertinent  to  the  purpose  we  take 
into  our  consideration."  They  are  for  sugges- 
tion —  "  to  excite  our  mind  to  return  and  pro- 
duce   such    knowledge    as   it    has  formerly  col- 


16  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

lected,  to  the  end  that  we  may  make  use 
thereof."  How  they  can  have  suggestive  power, 
as  Bacon  says  they  have,  may  not  have  been  ap- 
parent to  Mr.  White,  who  would  probably  have 
been  equally  gravelled  to  conceive  how  the  mere 
perusal,  hour  after  hour,  of  strings  of  words  in 
the  dictionary,  could  have  prepared  Chatham  for 
those  tremendous  fulminations  of  oratory,  which 
made  Parliament,  as  well  as  "  Judge  Felix," 
tremble. 

The  fundamental  misrepresentation  in  regard 
to  Mrs.  Pott's  illustrations  to  the  entries  is  in 
the  cool  assumption  that  they  are  put  forward  as 
parallelisms.  Of  course,  under  this  rule,  when- 
ever the  connections  are  remote,  shadowy,  recon- 
dite, or  entirely  lacking,  the  ingenious  Mr.  White 
scores  heavily  for  his  side  of  the  game,  and  the 
lady  is  brought  to  confusion,  all  the  more  utterly 
since  the  cases  of  alleged  "  parallelisms  "  are  of 
his  own  careful  selection.  The  fact  is,  that  Mrs. 
Pott  in  her  preface  makes  an  entirely  contrary 
representation.  She  says  :  "  It  is  desirable  to 
state,  at  the  outset,  that  the  passages  from  the 
plays  which  have  been  appended  to  the  entries 
do  not  profess  to  be  in  all  cases  parallels."  Some 
of  them,  she  continues,  are  put  forward  "  to 
show  identical  forms  of  speech  or  identical 
phrases."  Others  are  intended  to  reveal  "  ver- 
bal likenesses  in  the  uses  of  words,  in  Bacon  and 
Shakespeare,  not  found  in  previous  or  contem- 
porary writers."       Others  disclose  similarities  in 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  Vj 

thoughts,  truths,  opinions,  antitheses.  Still 
others  exhibit  sentiments  and  verbal  peculiari- 
ties common  to  both  Bacon  and  Shakespeare. 
In  a  word,  the  relations  between  the  entries  and 
the  illustrations  are  held  to  be  various  and  di- 
versified ;  the  paramount  point  being  that  these 
relations  exist  between  the  Promus  of  Bacon 
and  the  plays  of  Shakespeare,  and  not  between 
the  Promus  of  Bacon  and  the  work  of  any 
other  writer.  It  is  evident  that  Mr.  White's  at- 
tempt to  reduce  the  book  into  a  Noah's  ark  pro- 
cession of  intended  parallelisms  was  simply  for 
his  convenience  in  attacking  it,  and  it  is  sad  to 
think  that  so  great  a  reviewer  could  have  been  so 
disinofenuous. 

His  main  purpose  in  the  article  is  to  discredit 
Mrs.  Pott's  book  by  proving  that  between  the 
Promus  entries  and  the  Shakespeare  illustra- 
tions, there  is  no  identity  of  phrase  or  of 
thought.  By  way  of  "  showing  "  as  he  says, 
"  what  and  how  great  the  failure  is,"  he  presents 
what  he  calls  "  some  of  the  most  striking "  of 
the  memorandums  and  illustrations.  Prior  to  dis- 
cussing his  dealings  with  these  "  most  striking  " 
selections,  allow  me  to  present  a  few  of  my  own, 
culled  hastily  and  at  random  from  Mrs.  Pott's 
collection,  in  order  that  we  may  see  whether  the 
lack  of  identity  in  phrase  and  thought  is  quite 
as  absolute  as  Mr.  White  would  have  us  be- 
lieve. 


18  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

I  send  [this  history]  for  your  recreation,  considering  that 
love  must  creep  where  it  cannot  go.  —  Promus  Preface :  Bacon 
to  King  James. 

Ay,  gentle  Thurio  ;  for  you  know  that  love 
Will  creep  in  service  where  it  cannot  go. 

Two  Gentlemen  of  Verona,  IV.  2. 

Thought  is  free. 

Promus,  653. 
Thought  is  free. 

Tempest,  III. 

Clavum  clavo  pellere.  (With  one  nail  to  drive  out  another 
nail.)  —  Promus,  889. 

As  one  nail  by  strength  drives  out  another. 

Two  Gen,  Ver.  II.  4. 
One  fire  drives  out  one  fire  ;  one  nail  one  nail.  .  .  . 

Cor.  IV.  6. 

Qui  dissimulat  liber  non  est.  (He  who  dissembles  is  not 
free.)  —  Promus,  72. 

The  dissembler  is  a  slave. 

Pericles,  I.  1. 

Mors  et  fugacem  persequitur  virum.  (Death  pursues  even 
the  man  that  flies  from  him.)  —  Promus,  79. 

Away,  for  death  doth  hold  us  in  pursuit. 

3  Hen.  VI.  II.  5. 

Dilucolo  surgere  saluberrimum. 

Promus,  1198. 

Not  to  be  abed  after  midnight  is  to  be  up  betimes  ;  and 
dilucolo  surgere,  thou  knowest.  —  Twelfth  Night,  II.  3. 


Chameleon,  Proteus,  Euripus. 

Promus,  794. 
I  can  add  colors  to  the  Chameleon, 
Change  shapes  with  Proteus  for  advantages. 

Henry  VI.  III.  2. 

All  is  not  gold  that  glisters. 

Promus,  477. 

All  that  glisters  is  not  gold. 

Merchant  Venice,  II.  7. 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  19 

Argentangina  —  Sylver. 

Promus,  837. 

Celestial  Dian,  goddess  argentine 

A  maid  child,  called  Marina  ;  who,  O  goddess 
Wears  yet  thy  silver  livery. 

Pericles,  V.  1,  3. 


Golden  sleepe.     Uprouse. 

Promus,  1207,  1215. 

But  where  nnbruised  youth  with  unstuffed  brain, 
Doth  couch  his  limbs,  there  golden  sleep  doth  reign, 
Therefore  thy  earliness  doth  me  assure 
Thou  art  uproused  by  some  distemperature. 

Romeo  and  Juliet,  II.  3. 

Mineral  wits  strong  poisons. 

Promus,  81. 
The  thought  .  .  . 
Doth  lite  a  poisonous  mineral  gnaw  my  inwards. 

Othello,  II.  1. 

Full   music   of   easy  airs,   without  strange  accords  and  dis- 
cords. —  Promus,  86. 

How  sour  sweet  music  is 

When  time  is  broke  and  no  proportion  kept. 

Richard  II.  V.  5. 

Seldome  cometh  the  better. 

Promus,  472. 

Seldome  cometh  the  better. 

Richard  III.  II.  2. 


A  fool's  bolt  is  soon  shot. 

Promus,  106. 

A  fool's  bolt  is  soon  shot. 

Henry  V.  ///.  7. 

Black  will  take  no  other  hue. 

Promus,  174. 

Coal  black  is  better  than  another  hue, 
In  that  it  scorns  to  take  anothor  hue. 

Titus  Andronicus,  IV.  2. 


20  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

To  cast  beyond  the  moon. 

Promus,  629. 

I  aim  a  mile  beyond  the  moon. 

Titus  Andronicus,  IV.  3. 

Hail  of  pearl. 

Promus,  872. 

I  '11  set  thee  in  a  shower  of  gold, 
And  hail  rich  pearls  on  thee. 

Antony  and  Cleopatra,  II.  5. 

There  are  quantities  of  these  passages.  We 
ask  the  candid  reader  whether  there  is  no  iden- 
tity of  phrase  or  thought  in  the  samples  offered  ? 
Let  us  also  ask  why,  when  Mr.  White  was  select- 
ing his  "  parallelisms  "  for  discussion,  he  did  not, 
in  a  single  instance,  select  specimens  like  these? 

He  says  of  the  citations  he  has  chosen  to  pre- 
sent for  ridicule,  that  they  are  "  some  of  the 
most  striking  "  in  the  volume.  This  is  an  old 
trick  of  criticism.  "  Striking  "  is  precisely,  in 
every  instance,  what  his  citations  are  not.  In 
nearly  every  case,  they  are  among  the  instances 
where  the  connections  between  entry  and  illus- 
tration are  the  least  obvious,  and  these  connec- 
tions are  still  further  concealed  by  his  presenta- 
tion of  the  cases  intended  as  parallels,  and  some- 
times by  bold  diversions  of  the  reader's  attention 
to  points  not  at  issue,  on  the  principle  of  the 
English  huntsman  drawing  the  red  herring  across 
the  field  to  break  the  scent  of  the  hounds. 

Promus,  2,  is  his  first  quarry  :  "  Corni  con- 
tra croci.  Good  means  against  bad,  homes  to 
crosses."     His  first  effort  is  to  create  an  unlike- 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  21 

ness  between  the  Latin  basis  of  the  Promus 
note  and  the  sentences  from  Shakespeare  which 
Mrs.  Pott  has  appended  to  it.  This  is  all  merely 
dust  for  the  eyes  of  the  reader,  w^ho  can  readily 
see  that  his  principal  concern  is  not  with  the 
Latin  adage,  but  with  the  construction  put  upon 
it  by  Bacon  —  "  good  means  against  bad."  He 
can  also  see  as  readily  that  the  illustrative  Shake- 
speare sentences  are  all  echoes  (some  of  them 
verbal,  some  of  them  mental,  but  all  more  or  less 
distinct)  of  the  Promus  entry.  Mr.  White,  how- 
ever, denies  that  there  is  any  resemblance  between 
them.  Then  why,  in  citing  the  passages,  did  he 
deliberately  suppress  this  one  —  "  We  must  do 
good  against  evil"  [All^s  Well  that  Ends  Well, 
II.  5.)  Here  is  an  undeniable  parallelism  —  the 
sense  in  both  cases  being  that  evil  must  be  met 
with  good,  which  explains  why  Mr.  White  left 
the  line  out,  and  convicts  him  of  tampering  with 
the  text  in  order  to  prejudice  Mrs.  Pott's  argu- 
ment. Here,  then,  at  the  very  outset,  is  the  sort 
of  sleight  -  of  -  hand  we  catch  him  practising  ! 
Nothing  could  plainer  show  his  animus.  His 
method  in  deaUng  with  the  other  passages  is 
incomprehensible.  He  owns  that  the  Promus 
note  is  an  expression  of  opposition  ;  he  also  owns 
that  the  Shakespeare  citations  are  expressions  of 
opposition  ;  and  the  question  naturally  arises, 
how  then  can  Mrs.  Pott  be  considered  worthy  of 
contumely  for  having  taken  the  same  view  ? 
The  text  from  Maitliew  (vii.  6),  "  Nolite  dare 


22  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

sanctum  canibus  —  Give  not  that  which  is  holy 
unto  dogs "  [Proiuus,  11),  is  the  next  selec- 
tion. The  illustration  given  is  from  As  You 
Like  It,  I.  3  :  — 

Celia.     Why,  cousin  !  .  .  .  not  a  word  ! 
Rosalind.     Not  one  to  throw  at  a  dog. 

Celia.     No,  thy  words  are  too  precious  to  be  cast  away  upon 
curs. 

This  is  without  importance  or  significance, 
Mr.  White  says,  because  the  text  had  been  known 
all  over  Europe  for  centuries  —  in  other  words, 
that  being  open  to  everybody,  reference  to  it  in 
two  Avorks  is  no  proof  of  a  common  authorsliip. 
He  considers  this  reason  so  cogent,  that  he  ad- 
vances it  again  and  again  in  the  course  of  his 
article,  whenever  Biblical  texts  are  in  question. 
Under  the  circumstances,  it  has  not  the  slightest 
validity,  as  a  moment's  reflection  ought  to  have 
shown  him.  The  texts,  proverbs,  etc.,  collected 
into  the  Promus  were  of  course  common  prop- 
erty, and  if  they  were  found  in  the  works  of 
the  contemporary  poets  and  dramatists,  besides 
Shakespeare,  his  reasoning  might  have  force. 
But,  with  the  rarest  exceptions,  they  are  not,  as 
Mrs.  Pott's  investigations  have  proved.  They 
are  in  the  Promus  and  they  are  in  Shakespeare. 
Hence  when  we  find  the  philosopher  noting  and 
the  poet  quoting,  and  virtually  no  others,  we 
have  a  plain  right,  in  ordinary  good  sense,  to  in- 
fer some  connection,  which  will  hardly  be  tliat 
Bacon  kept  a  note-book  for  the  use  of  Shake- 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  23 

speare.  As  for  this  particular  illustration,  which 
Mr.  White  has  the  grace  to  call  "  meaningless," 
it  is  evident  that  the  text  says  holy  things  must 
not  be  given  to  the  dogs,  and  the  play  that  pre- 
cious things  must  not  be  given  to  the  dogs,  which 
would  reasonably  seem  to  establish  resemblance. 
Mr.  White  avows  that  he  finds  it  hard  to  keep 
his  countenance  at  the  illustrations  Mrs.  Pott 
appends  to  Promus,  24,  the  famous  line  from 
Virgil,  "  Procul,  0  procul,  este  profani."  His 
mu'th,  however,  may  be  strongly  suspected  of 
affectation,  for  the  illustrations  are  reminiscent 
of  the  manner  and  spirit  of  the  Latin  expres- 
sion, especially  when  it  is  considered  in  connec- 
tion with  the  scene  in  the  sixth  book  of  the 
j^neid,  where  it  occurs.  The  dreadful  rites 
are  performed  ;  the  infernal  goddess  comes,  as 
the  gale  comes,  making  the  region  tremble. 
"  Hence,  0  hence  !  ye  uninitiate  !  vanish  from 
the  forest,"  shrieks  the  sibyl,  and  as  the  com- 
panions of  ^neas  scatter  and  fly,  she  turns,  her 
face  blazing  with  madness,  and  rushes  down  to 
Avernus,  followed  by  the  hero.  The  force  and 
passion  of  the  sibyl's  imperatives  cannot  be 
transfused  into  our  language  ;  the  literal  render- 
ing, "  Hence,  0  hence,  ye  uninitiate,"  being  flat 
as  dish-water.  But  the  line,  though  it  cannot 
be  translated  into  English,  can  be  imitated,  and 
this  has  been  done  in  the  Shakespeare  sentences 
given  by  Mrs.  Pott  —  "  Rogues,  hence  !  avaunt ! 
vanish    like   hail-stones !    go  I  "    "  Avaunt,   thou 


24  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

hateful  villain !  "  "  Aroint  thee,  witch,  aroint 
thee  !  "  etc.  These  homely,  energetic,  familiar 
bursts,  characteristic  of  Shakespeare,  are  in 
marked  contrast  with  the  manner  of  the  more 
formal  and  grandiose  dramatists  of  his  time,  and 
in  fact  are  new  modes  of  speech  introduced  into 
poetry  by  the  author.  There  is  no  reason  why 
they  might  not  have  had  their  germ  in  the  Vir- 
gilian  line,  or,  at  any  rate,  why  that  line,  so 
similar  in  intensity  and  free  fury,  might  not 
have  been  set  in  a  Promus  note-book  as  a  sug- 
gestive memorandum  for  their  introduction. 

The  next  example  shows  the  red  herring  style 
of  treatment.  Pi^oiniis,  43,  is  a  note  from  Eras- 
mus, "  Semper  virgines  furise  "  (The  furies  are 
always  maidens),  to  which  Bacon  adds,  "  Court- 
ing a  fury."  The  addition  Mr.  White  judi- 
ciously suppresses,  inasmuch  as  Mrs.  Pott's  illus- 
tration, "  Will  you  woo  this  wild-cat  ?  "  from  the 
Taming  of  the  Shrew,  forms  a  little  parallel- 
ism not  quite  convenient  for  injurious  comment. 
Her  other  illustration  is  Benedick's  speech  from 
Much  Ado  About  Nothing  (I.  1) :  •'  Her  cousin, 
an  she  were  not  possessed  with  a  fury,  exceeds 
her  as  much  in  beauty  as  the  first  of  May  does 
the  last  of  December."  Upon  this  Mr.  White 
draws  the  reader  away  with  descant  on  the  fact 
that  Erasmus  notes,  loithout  surprise,  that  the 
Furies  are  maidens,  while  Benedick  notes,  with 
surprise,  that  his  maiden  is  a  fury.  Hence,  says 
this  artful  man,  no  similarity.     But  the  surprise 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  25 

or  composure  of  either  Erasmus  or  Beuedick  is 
not  the  matter  at  issue.  (Benedick,  by  the  way, 
expresses  no  surprise  at  all.)  The  point  made  by 
both  entry  and  illustration  is  that  the  maidens  are 
furies.  The  assumption  of  connection,  also,  be- 
tween the  Baconian  note  and  the  Shakespearean 
illustration  is  strengthened  by  Bacon's  addition, 
"  Courting  a  fury,"  which  is  the  position  in  which 
Benedick  is  eventually  found  with  Beatrice. 

The  next  passage  which  Mr.  White  finds  des- 
titute of  all  "  connection  or  relation  "  is  the 
Promus,  249,  "  Wisdom  is  justified  of  her  chil- 
dren "  {Matthew  xi.  19),  combined  with  the  fol- 
lowing- illustrations :  — 

And  make  us  heirs  of  all  eternity.  —  Love's  Labor  's  Lost, 
1.1. 

Earthly  godfathers  of  heaven's  lights.  —  lb. 

This  child  of  fancj'.  —  lb. 

The  first  heir  of  my  invention.  —  Dedication  to  Venus  and 
Adonis. 

The  children  of  an  idle  brain.  —  Romeo  and  Juliet,  I.  4. 

Mr.  White  obligingly  explains  for  us  the 
meaning  of  the  text,  but  this  is  probably  only 
one  of  his  dashes  with  the  Yarmouth  bloater 
across  the  hunting-field,  intended  to  draw  off  the 
keen-scented  reader.  If  not,  —  that  is,  if  he 
was  sincere  in  his  comment,  —  I  can  only  say 
that  he  missed  the  sense  of  the  entry  and  illus- 
tration  entirely.  What  apparently  struck  the 
transcriber  of  the  text  in  the  Promus  was  not, 
as  Mr.  AVhite  says,  that  the  progeny  of  Wisdom 
"  prove  their  parentage  by  their  conduct,"  but 


26  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.      * 

the  bold  literary  conception  of  an  abstract  qual- 
ity having  children  of  flesh  and  blood.  Ac- 
cordingly, the  text  becomes  the  germ  of  sen- 
tences in  which  the  conception  is  continued  and 
varied,  and  abstractions  or  inanimate  things  are 
endowed  with  similar  relatives.  Just  as  Wisdom 
has  her  sons  and  daughters  among  mankind, 
eternity  is  made  to  have  mortal  heirs,  the  stars 
earthly  godfathers,  fancy  a  material  child,  in- 
vention an  heir,  and  an  idle  brain  children.  It 
is  to  be  hoped  that  the  minds  are  few  that  can 
fail  to  see  "  connection  or  relation "  between 
such  a  note  and  such  an  illustration. 

In  his  next  citation,  the  reviewer  not  only 
slathers  the  red  herrino^  across  the  field  with 
most  unscrupulous  determination,  but  uses  bad 
language  against  Mrs.  Pott  Avith  ferocious  energy, 
and  sneers  and  sniffs  like  a  dragon.  Although 
w  orthy  of  all  respect  as  a  scholar  of  rare  attain- 
ments and  abilities,  and  as  a  lady,  she  is  called 
a  "  Bacon-saving  Shakespearean,"  charged  with 
"  staring  ineptness  and  puerility,"  and  accused 
of  having  made  a  "  flagrant  exhibition  of  a 
kind  and  degree  of  ignorance  of  Shakespeare's 
writings  which  is  characteristic  "  of  such  as 
she.  God  be  merciful  unto  us,  a  sinner !  To 
make  these  parlous  words  as  good  as  possible, 
and  leave  her  without  a  shadow  of  excuse  before 
the  Draconian  public,  Mr.  White  gives  only  a 
small  part  of  her  inept  and  puerile  illustration, 
and  suppresses  the  larger  and  most  appropriate 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  27 

portion.  The  fatal  entry  is  Promus,  489,  "  A 
cat  may  look  on  a  king,"  to  which  this  judicial 
man,  following  the  lady's  text,  appends  as  illus- 
tration the  ensuing  lines  :  — 

Benvolio.     What  is  Tybalt  ? 
Mercutio.     More  than  prince  of  cats. 

Romeo  and  Juliet,  IV.  2. 

What  he  suppresses,  is  the  following  :  — 

Benvolio.     We  talk  here  in   the  pnblic  haunts  of  men.  .  .  . 
.  .  .  All  eyes  gaze  on  us. 

Mercutio.     Men's  eyes  were  made  to  look  and  let  them  gaze. 

Tybalt.     Here  comes  my  man.  .  .  . 
What  would'st  thou  have  with  me  ? 

Mercutio.     Good  king  of  cats,  nothing  but  one  of  your  nine 
lives. 

His  fragment  of  these  lines  unavoidably  ad- 
mitted, Mr.  White,  like  one  uneasy  lest  the  reader 
may  follow  even  this  slight  trail,  at  once  races 
over  the  field  with  his  herring.  He  vehemently 
avers  that  in  the  old  Italian  novel  there  was  a 
Tibaldo ;  that  Arthur  Brooke  rendered  the  tale 
into  an  English  poem  a  year  before  Bacon  was 
born ;  and  that  Tybert,  Tybalt,  and  Thibault 
were  all  names  for  pussy  in  Europe  for  centuries. 
Well,  what  of  it  ?  We  all  know  that  Tib  the  cat 
was  known  as  Tybalt,  especially  as  Mr.  White 
is  kind  enough  to  tell  us  so,  and  more  especially 
because  the  information  is  in  the  notes  and  com- 
mentaries appended  to  a  number  of  popular  edi- 
tions of  Shakespeare,  which  is  where  Mr.  White 
himself  got  it,  and  where  Mrs.  Pott  was  unable 
to  get  it,  on  account  of  her  "  flagrant  "  "  igno- 


28  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

ranee  of  Shakespeare's  writing-s."  We  all  know 
this,  and  we  are  perfectly  sensible  of  the  force  of 
Mercutio's  punning  reference  to  Tybalt  as  a  cat. 
But  all  that  is  not  the  question.  The  question, 
as  this  slippery  scholar  of  Shakespeare  knew  full 
well,  is  upon  Mercutio's  taunting  Master  Tibaldo, 
not  as  a  cat,  but  first  as  "2^Tmce  of  cats,"  and 
then  as  "  king  of  cats."  Upon  this  small  point, 
the  fact  that  Tybert,  Tybalt,  and  Thibault  were 
old  names  in  Europe  for  a  tom-cat  throws  no 
light  Avhatever,  and  accordingly  Mr.  White's 
elaborate  display  of  learning  is  wholly  irrelevant. 
On  the  other  hand,  Mrs.  Pott's  citation  from 
Momeo  and  Juliet,  with  its  prominent  reference 
to  "  a  cat,"  "  a  king,"  and  "  looking,"  certainly 
suofpfests  —  all  the  more  since  Mr.  White  strove 
to  keep  it  shady  —  that  the  author,  in  composing 
the  dialogue  quoted,  received  random  and  whim- 
sical suggestions  from  the  proverb  "  A  cat  may 
look  on  a  king."  It  is  impossible  to  deny  that 
the  adage  has  the  main  verbal  elements  of  the  bit 
in  the  play,  and  it  is  equally  impossible  to  assume 
that  the  author  could  have  written  the  scene  in 
the  play  without  remembering  the  well-known 
adage. 

"  Neither  too  heavy  nor  too  hot "  {Promus, 
651)  gives  Mr.  White  occasion  to  deform  the 
sweetness  of  his  style  with  sneers  at  Mrs.  Pott 
because  she  appends  to  the  entry  a  number  of 
passages  from  Shakespeare  in  which  the  words 
"  too  heavy  "  and  ''  too  hot  "  are  used  m  a  man- 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  29 

ner  verbally  peculiar  to  that  author.  He  says 
that  the  saying  was  applied  to  a  bold  thief  who 
would  steal  anything  not  too  heavy  nor  too  hot 
for  him  to  carry,  but  it  is  certain  that  Bacon 
never  put  it  into  his  Promus  as  a  memorandum 
of  a  thief's  audacity.  What,  then,  did  he  put  it 
there  for? 

"  A  ring  of  gold  on  a  swine's  snout "  {Pro- 
miis,  687)  is  illustrated  by  Mrs.  Pott  with  the 
Shakespearean  line,  "  A  rich  jewel  in  an  Ethi- 
op's  ear  "  {Romeo  and  Juliet,  I.  5),  the  illus- 
tration being  mildly  called  by  Mr.  White  an 
"  absui'dity."  To  make  the  absurdity  apparent, 
he  essays  to  bring  out  the  sense  of  the  simile  in 
Romeo  and  Juliet,  by  citing  from  the  XXVIIth 
Sonnet,  — 

Which  like  a  jewel  hung  iu  ghastly  night 

Makes  black  night  beauteous  and  her  old  face  new. 

"  It  would  seem,  then,"  he  says,  "  that  the  sol- 
emn figure  of  Night  with  her  dark  begemmed 
robe  was  suggested  to  the  author  of  Romeo 
and  Juliet  by  a  pig's  snout,  with  a  ring  on  it 
to  keep  him  from  rooting."  So  that  upon  his 
reading  of  the  Promus  note,  swine  had  gold 
rings  put  on  their  snouts  to  keep  them  from 
rooting,  —  a  rather  costly  accoutrement,  one 
would  say ;  and  this  is  quite  equalled  by  the 
hocus-pocus  process  with  which  he  gets  a  solemn 
Night  with  a  dark  begemmed  robe,  out  of  the 
negrine  cheek  and  ear  in  Romeo's  simile,  and 
out   of   the   swarthy   and   ghastly  face   of   eld 


30  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

evoked  by  tlie  sonnet !  There  is  no  "  absurd- 
ity "  whatever  in  Mrs.  Pott's  coupling  of  the 
line  with  the  Promus  note.  They  are  both 
signal  examples  of  antithesis,  and  of  the  same 
kind.  The  essence  of  "  A  ring  of  gold  on  a 
swine's  snout "  is  in  the  contrast  of  something 
beautiful  with  something  ugly,  and  the  essence 
of  "  A  rich  jewel  in  an  Ethiop's  ear  "  is  in  pre- 
cisely the  same  contrast.  An  identical  principle 
of  creation  underlies  both  similes  and  might  a 
thousand  such,  all  ostensibly  different. 

Mrs.  Pott's  illustration  of  "  Laconismus " 
(Promus,  706),  by  the  line  "  Like  the  Roman 
in  brevity"  (2  Henry  IV.  II.  2),  Mr.  White 
calls  "  fairly  Irish  in  its  blundering,  as  the  La- 
conians  were  not  Romans  but  Greeks."  No 
man  had  less  title  than  he  to  deride  the  glass- 
blowing  process  by  which  one  shape  of  thought 
is  developed  with  seeming  irrelevance  out  of  an- 
other, /*romz«  s-fashion.  The  Latin  word  "  la- 
conismus "  before  him,  which  simply  means  "  la- 
conism  "  or  "  brevity,"  and,  presto  !  he  obtains 
from  it  the  conclusion  that  the  Laconians  were 
not  Romans  but  Greeks  !  "  Laconismus,"  being 
Latin,  might  easily  suggest  that  the  Romans,  too, 
as  well  as  the  Laconians,  had  their  brovity,  as  in 
Tacitus  ;  and  where  is  the  Hibernianism  in  sup- 
posing that  the  word  might  have  been  entered 
in  a  Promus  note-book  as  a  phonographic  mem- 
orandum for  passages  in  Shakespeare  regarding 
brevity,  of  which  there  are  about  a  hundred  ? 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  31 

Next  we  have  Promus,  689,  "  Riper  than 
a  mulberry,  —  of  a  mild  soft-mannered  man." 
The  illustration  is  "  Humble  as  the  ripest  mul- 
berry "  [Corlolanus,  III.  2),  and  being  quite 
apt,  is  therefore  suppressed  by  Mr.  White,  who 
has  no  better  comment  to  offer  than  the  spark- 
ling pleasantry  that  Bacon  probably  meant  the 
note  as  a  suggestion  for  the  actor  Raymond's 
Colonel  Mulberry  Sellers ! 

Promus,  959,  "  Love  me  little,  love  me  long  " 
is  the  next  selection.  It  is  illustrated  by 
"  Therefore  love  moderately,  long  love  doth  so  " 
{Romeo  and  Juliet,  II.  5),  which,  being  also 
almost  as  like  the  note  as  seal  and  print,  is  dis- 
creetly withheld  by  Mr.  White,  who  offers  in- 
stead some  more  wit  of  his  own,  to  the  effect 
that  the  Promus  entry  probably  inspired  one 
of  Charles  Reade's  novels.  Charles  Reade,  in- 
deed !  that  keen,  brilliant,  alert,  incisive  intel- 
lect, who  in  another  of  his  novels  (Foul  Piety) 
has  thrown  the  most  searching  doubt,  from  an 
entirely  new  point  of  view,  upon  Shakespeare's 
authorship,  and  is  therefore,  on  Mr.  White's  the- 
ory, a  fit  subject  for  Bedlam  !  Charles  Reade 
was  certainly  an  unlucky  name  for  Shakespeare's 
Scholar  to  conjure  with  ! 

The  French  proverb  next  chosen  {Promus, 
1544)  is  simply  treated  with  ridicule,  probably 
for  the  reason  that  its  members  are  all  perfectly 
reproduced  in  the  illustrations. 

Another  French  proverb  follows,  "  Nourriture 


32  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

passe  nature  "  {Promiis,  1595),  which  has  for 
its  first  iUustration  the  following  passage  :  — 

Those  mothers  who  to  nousle  up  their  babes, 
Thought  not  too  curious,  are  ready  now, 
To  eat  those  little  darlings  whom  they  loved. 
So  sharp  are  hunger's  teeth,  that  man  and  wife 
Draw  lots  who  fii-st  shall  die  to  lengthen  life. 

Pericles,  Act  I.  Sc.  4. 

This,  Mr.  White  says,  "as  an  illustration 
of  '  nourriture  passe  nature,'  surpasses  all  the 
Shakespearean  jokes  that  I  have  had  the  good 
fortune  to  encounter."  I  think  that  he  himself, 
as  a  Shakespearean  joker,  is  also  quite  surpass- 
ing. It  is  part  of  his  light  Shakespearean  humor 
to  translate  "  nourriture  passe  nature "  into 
"  breedinof  is  a  second  nature."  The  selection 
of  the  word  "  breeding  "  for  "  nourriture  "  is 
quite  pranksome,  I  admit,  but  hardly  ingenuous. 
It  is,  of  course,  a  rhetorical  artifice,  the  object 
being  to  lessen  the  likeness  between  the  proverb 
and  the  illustration,  at  Mrs.  Pott's  expense.  The 
word  "  breeding,"  with  us,  refers  to  the  forma- 
tion of  manners,  and  as  a  translation  of  "  nourri- 
ture "  would  make  the  proverb  untrue  and  ridic- 
ulous. Sir  John  Chester,  in  Barnaby  Rudge, 
was  a  very  well-bred  man,  but  his  breeding  had 
no  force  over  his  very  evil  nature,  which  con- 
tinued as  bad  as  possible  to  the  end.  Dr.  John- 
son, on  the  contrary,  was  a  very  ill-bred  man, 
but  his  poor  training  never  diminished  the  no- 
ble sturdy  virtues  with  which  he  was  born,  and 
which  in   their  solidity  sustained  even  the  mi- 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  33 

croscopic  scrutiny  of  Boswell.  It  is  a  pretty 
note  in  Mr.  White  to  set  up  that  Turveydrop 
is  of  the  first  potency !  The  proverb  simply 
means,  as  Surenne  gives  it,  "  habit  is  second 
nature."  Well,  it  is  evident  that  the  habit  of 
fasting.  Spartan-fashion,  or  in  the  style  of  Dr. 
Tanner,  would  enable  people  to  more  easily  re- 
sist the  demands  of  appetite  :  Marshal  Saxe  rec- 
ommends that  once  a  week,  at  least,  food  should 
not  be  served  out  to  the  troops,  to  render  them, 
in  case  of  necessity,  less  sensible  to  their  priva- 
tion. It  is  equally  evident  that  the  habit  of  hav- 
ing had  frequent  and  regular  meals  would  tend, 
during  a  famine,  to  make  people  cannibals,  and 
the  thing  has  notoriously  happened  a  thousand 
times.  Then  what  is  there  ridiculous  in  the  idea 
that  the  picture  of  mothers  ready  through  fam- 
ine to  devour  tlieir  children  is  an  illustration  of 
an  adage  which  says  that  habit  is  stronger  than 
nature,  —  which  says,  in  effect,  that  the  habi- 
tudes of  feeding  are  stronger  than  maternal 
love?  The  point  is  one  which  the  reviewer 
might  have  chewed  upon  during  the  intervals  of 
his  fine  Shakespearean  laughter  ! 

His  cachinnatory  exercise  continues  over  the 
next  Fr omits  entry  (1404),  which  is  merely  "  0 
the,"  and  is  considered  by  Mrs.  Pott  as  a  mem- 
orandum for  forms  of  ejaculation  quite  usual 
in  Shakespeare,  such  as  "  0  the  heavens  !  "  "0 
the  devil  !  "  "0  the  gods  !  "  etc.  It  should 
be  remarked  that  these  ejaculatory  forms  are  a 


34  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

distinctive  though  minor  feature  of  the  free, 
familiar,  ordinary,  passionate  speech  which  dif- 
ferentiates the  Shakespeare  plays  from  the  more 
artificial  and  magniloquent  work  of  the  other 
Elizabethan  dramatists,  and  might  therefore  well 
be  the  subject  of  a  Pro7nus  jotting.  Mr. 
White,  however,  in  his  superior  wisdom,  con- 
siders Mrs.  Pott's  piecing  out  of  the  brief  a 
"  senseless  union  of  words,"  pretends  to  be  im- 
mensely amused  by  it,  and  declares  that  the  "  0 
the  "  is  a  mere  phonetic  spelling  of  othe  (oath), 
the  first  letter  having  accidentally  got  separated 
from  the  second  !  Unfortunately  for  this  sage 
declaration,  which  appears  to  be  derived  from 
the  "  Bil  Stumps  his  mark  "  episode  in  Pick- 
wick, the  manuscript  entry  in  the  Promiis  is 
distinctly  "  0  y%"  the  old  form  for  "  0  the," 
and  not  othe ;  so  that  Mr.  White's  suggestion 
is  perfectly  gratuitous  and  disproved  from  the 
start.  Furthermore,  that  the  entry  is  really  "  0 
the,"  is  distinctly  indicated  by  the  fact  that  it  is 
immediately  followed  by  another  exclamation 
{Promiis,  1405),  "  0  my  L,  sr  "  [Lord  sir],  the 
shorthand  character  of  this  entry  of  course  sus- 
taining the  idea  that  the  preceding  was  also 
jotted  down  incompletely.  Still  further,  the  en- 
tries immediately  succeeding  are  all  of  an  ex- 
clamatory character,  showing  that  the  "  0  the  " 
is  one  of  a  string  of  notes  for  forms  of  ejacula- 
tion. All  which  is  extremely  bad  for  our  gay 
comedian. 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  35 

These  witty  and  brilliant  successes  reach  their 
culmination  in  the  discussion  of  the  "  good  mor- 
row "  question,  wherein  Mr.  White  manifestly 
lays  himself  out  to  utterly  demolish  Mrs.  Pott, 
and  treats  her  and  her  statements  with  even 
more  than  his  customary  incivility.  How  less 
than  little  ground  he  has  for  this  course,  and 
what  incredible  ignorance  he  discloses  of  the 
point  under  discussion,  a  few  words  will  show. 
The  Promiis  contains  forty-five  notes  (1180- 
1233)  for  forms  of  morning  and  evening  saluta- 
tions and  phrases  of  compliment  in  connection 
with  the  time  of  day.  Among  these  are  "  good 
morrow"  and  "good  even,"  and  as  these,  with 
others,  are  found  in  singular  prominence  in  the 
Shakespeare  plays  and  hardly  elsewhere,  and  as 
the  "  good  morrow "  of  the  Promiis,  together 
with  such  an  odd  morning  salutation  as  "  Bon 
jour,"  appears  again  in  Romeo  and  Juliet,  it  is 
concluded  that  this,  so  far  as  it  goes,  is  evidence 
that  the  same  hand  that  penned  the  Promus 
penned  the  play,  and  that  morning  and  even- 
ing salutations,  as  such,  were  of  Bacon's  intro- 
duction (not  invention)  in  England ;  in  other 
words,  that  they  came  into  fashion  through  the 
drama.  Leaving  aside  the  question  whether 
Bacon  wrote  Romeo  and  Juliet,  as  Mr.  White 
in  his  discussion  substantially  leaves  it  aside, 
there  is  nothing  so  very  startling,  or  provocative 
of  violent  unbelief,  in  the  proposition  that  we 
did   not   always   use    distinctively  morning  and 


36  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

evening  salutations;  that  is,  say  "good  morn- 
ing "  and  "  good  evening."  There  are  fashions 
in  salutation  as  in  everything  else.  Just  be- 
fore Bacon's  time,  kissing  and  embracing  were 
the  forms  of  salutation  at  meeting  and  parting 
in  England  at  all  hours.  (See  the  epistles  of 
Erasmus.)  Men  when  they  met  embraced  and 
laid  cheek  to  cheek,  first  the  right,  then  the  left : 
men  and  women  when  they  met  kissed  each 
other.  We  did  not  always  shake  hands.  But, 
apparently  oblivious  of  the  fact  that  such  things 
go  by  modes,  Mr.  White  fairly  bursts  into  erup- 
tion over  Mrs.  Pott's  modestly  and  simply  put 
statement  that  the  habit  of  using  forms  of  morn- 
ing and  evening  salutations  in  words  appears  to 
have  come  into  vogue  only  in  Elizabeth's  time, 
and  through  Bacon  and  the  plays.  The  "  most 
amazing  assertion  "  and  "  the  most  amazing  in- 
ference that  exists  to  my  knowledge  in  all  Eng- 
lish critical  literature  ; "  "  might  mislead  many 
readers  whose  knowledge  of  the  subject  is  even 
less  than  that  shown  by  the  compiler  of  this 
volume ;  "  a  "  self  delusion,"  a  "  preposterous  in- 
credibility," a  "  frantic  fancy  ;  "  these  are  the 
insulting  phrases  and  epithets  he  thinks  him- 
self called  upon  to  shower  over  this  monstrous 
heresy.  The  prime  beauty  of  this  arrogant  abuse 
is  that  when  he  attempts  to  discuss  the  matter, 
he  shows  that  he  has  not  a  particle  of  reason  for 
his  conviction.  As  usual,  his  discussion  rests 
upon  a  flagrant  perversion  of  Mrs.  Pott's  state- 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  37 

ment.  His  first  argument  is,  a  priori,  that  her 
assertion  cannot  be  true  because  no  civilized 
people  "  in  the  sixteenth  century  "  could  have 
been  without  "  customary  salutation  and  valedic- 
tion at  morning  and  evening."  "  A  society  so 
beyond  civility  as  to  be  without  forms  of  saluta- 
tion would  be  one  in  which  neither  a  Bacon  nor 
a  Shakespeare  would  be  possible."  This  is  flat 
misrepresentation.  Mrs.  Pott  does  not  say  that 
the  Elizabethans  were  without  "  forms  of  saluta- 
tion/' nor  does  she  say  that  they  did  not  use 
words  of  greeting  and  parting  at  morning  and 
evening,  as  Mr.  White  knew  very  well,  since  he 
knew  how  to  read.  She  does  not  even  say  that 
"  good  morning  "  and  "  good  evening  "  were  not 
sometimes  used,  but  the  contrary,  and  it  is  she 
who  furnishes  the  evidence  of  their  occasional 
use  in  instances  from  Stubbs,  Ben  Jonson,  Beau- 
mont, Fletcher,  etc.,  which  Mr.  White  borrows 
from  her  volume,  and  then  has  the  coolness  to 
use  against  her.  Her  position  is  simply  that 
forms  of  morning  and  evening  salutation,  ver- 
bally apparent  in  themselves  as  such,  although 
occasionally  employed,  were  not  customary  at 
that  time.  She  says  that  these  particular  forms 
of  salutation,  although  in  almost  every  play  of 
Shakespeare,  "  were  not  in  common  use  "  until 
years  after ;  again,  that  they  were  not  used  "  as 
a  rule  "  in  the  early  part  of  the  sixteenth  cen- 
tury ;  and  again,  "  it  does  not  appear  that  [good 
morrow]    had    become  a  necessary  or  common 


38  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

salutation  ;  "  and  still  again,  "  it  is  certain  that 
the  habit  of  usino;  forms  of  morninor  and  evenino" 
salutations  was  not  introduced  into  Eno-land 
prior  to  the  date  of  Bacon's  notes,  1594."  These 
citations  show  the  flagrant  unfairness  of  Mr. 
White's  representations.  The  same  unfairness 
is  shown  bj  his  treatment  of  Mrs.  Pott's  quite 
reasonable  suggestion  that  the  greeting  "  good 
morrow,"  which  she  adduces  from  a  tract  printed 
before  Bacon's  time  (John  Bon  and  blaster 
Parson),  was  not  necessarily  an  earhj  morning 
salutation  as  in  Romeo  and  Juliet;  in  other 
words,  that  it  might  have  been  used  at  quite  an 
advanced  hour  of  the  day.  This  he  merely  scoffs 
at  as  "  self-delusion "  and  a  "  despairing  at- 
tempt," asking  in  an  up-and-a-coming  manner 
what  "  good  morrow  "  could  have  been  used  for 
if  not  as  an  early  morning  salutation.  I  answer, 
just  what  it  is  used  for  in  the  southern  part  of 
this  country  —  to  express  in  salutation  the  time 
of  day  up  to  dinner  ;  that  is,  generally,  up  to 
two  or  three  o'clock.  Until  dinner  time,  as 
any  one  who  has  lived  at  the  South  knows,  a 
Southerner  always  says  "  good  morning."  After 
that,  it  is  always  "  good  evening,"  never,  as  at 
the  North,  "  good  afternoon."  It  is  precisely 
the  same  in  England  at  this  day.  Mr.  White 
knew  very  well  when  he  was  writing  that  if  a 
London  lady,  dining  at  six  o'clock  in  the  even- 
ing, stops  at  her  draper's  or  jeweller's  at  five 
o'clock,  their  salutation  will  be  "  good  morning." 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  39 

Or  was  his  ignorance  on  the  point  so  dense  that 
he  needed  the  elementary  instruction  of  the 
Dictionary,  where  he  would  have  found  the 
definition  "  morning  .  .  .  variously  understood 
as  the  earhest  hours  of  light,  the  time  from 
midnight  until  noon,  frovfi  rising  until  dinner, 
etc."  The  fact  is  that  on  this  subject,  Mr. 
White  is  as  usual  more  rantankerous  than  ra- 
tional, and  not  much  less  so  in  what  he  says 
about  the  titles  of  Gascoigne's  poems.  Good 
Morrow  and  Good  Nicjht,  which  Mrs.  Pott  re- 
fers to  with  the  remark  that  they  are  merely 
titles,  and  do  not  imply  current  salutations. 
Whereat  her  critic  demands  to  know  with  what 
propriety  they  could  be  used  as  titles,  if  they 
were  not  known  as  salutations !  With  the  same 
propriety  that  Good  Noon  could  be  used  as  a 
title,  although  not  known  as  a  salutation.  If 
Mr.  White  had  glanced  at  the  wretched  stuff 
stout  old  George  Gascoigne  wrote  and  thought 
poetry,  he  would  have  seen  that  the  titles  of  the 
verses  in  question  had  no  reference  whatever  to 
salutations.  In  order  to  enjoy  a  good  night, 
don't  forget  God,  is  the  staple  of  one  poem  ;  the 
morning  is  a  good  one,  because  the  night  with 
its  terrors  and  dangers  is  past,  is  the  sense  of 
the  other.  To  listen  to  the  reviewer  one  would 
think  that  nobody  could  say  that  he  had  had 
a  good  night,  or  was  having  a  good  morning, 
without  referring  to  current  salutations. 

All  this  high-flying  insolence  is  clearly  due,  as 


40  HAMLET'S   NOTE-BOOK. 

the  reader  of  the  article  very  soon  divines,  to  the 
intoxicating  sense  of  the  bloody  massacre  this 
Tamerlane  of  reviewers  has  forelaid  from  the 
start.  One  can  see  from  the  outset  of  his  "  good 
morrow  "  discussion,  that  it  is  all  preliminary  to 
one  final  stroke,  sanguinary  and  horrible,  which 
he  has  meditated,  and  which  he  at  last  lets  fall, 
7^imbombo,  with  a  dark  and  dreadful  smile  of 
triumph.  Description  cannot  describe  the  air  of 
unbounded  exultation  with  which  he  proceeds  to 
finally  settle  Mrs.  Pott's  case  for  her,  spreading 
out  the  catastrophe  over  the  best  part  of  two 
pages.  We  will  now  show,  he  says,  according 
to  "  the  Bacon-saving  Shakespeare  folk  them- 
selves" (oh,  but  this  is  withering!),  that  Bacon 
himself,  if  he  wrote  the  drama,  furnishes  the  most 
indubitable,  the  most  crushing,  the  most  fatal 
evidence  that  "  English  people,  of  all  sorts  and 
conditions,"  were  at  that  time  in  the  habit  of 
saying  good  morning.  Then  he  lets  fly  the 
ruin  ! 

"  In  the  Second  Part  of  King  Henry  VI., 
Act  III.  Sc.  1,"  he  continues,  "  is  the  following 
passage :  — 

Queen.     We  know  the  time  since  he  was  mild  and  affable, 
And  if  we  did  but  glance  a  far-ott'  look, 
Immediately  he  was  upon  his  knee. 
Till  all  the  court  admired  him  for  submission. 
But  meet  him  now,  he  it  in  the  mom 
When  every  one  loill  give  the  time  of  day. 
He  knits  his  brow  and  shows  an  angry  eye, 
And  passeth  by,  etc. 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  41 

"  The  bearing  of  this  passage  is  such,"  says 
Mr.  \yhite,  glowering  with  carnage,  "it  is  so 
broad,  so  clear,  so  direct,  and  its  testimony  comes 
from  such  a  quarter,  that  it  might  be  well  to 
leave  the  point  upon  which  it  touches  without 
another  word  of  remark.  ...  It  will  be  seen 
that  according  to  those  w  ho  proclaim  that  Bacon 
is  Shakespeare  .  .  .  Bacon  himself  declares  that 
at  the  time  when  he  wrote  this  passage,  every 
one  in  England  said  good  morning."  "  It  will 
be  seen  "  nothing  of  the  kind,  and  Mr.  White 
ought  to  have  been  ashamed  of  himself.  After 
all  his  hectoring  parade  of  critical  superiority, 
he  shows  that  he  did  not  even  know  the  mean- 
ing of  the  Shakespearean  text  in  which  he  passed 
as  an  expert.  Yet  it  needed  no  Delian  diver  to 
have  informed  him  that  in  the  Elizabethan  age 
people  could  "  give  the  time  of  day "  without 
the  least  approach  to  saying  "  good  morning," 
and  here  is  the  way  they  did  it :  — 

1st  Lord.     The  good  time  of  day  to  you,  sir, 
2nd  Lord.    I  also  wish  it  to  you. 

Timon  of  Athens,  III.  6. 

Is  not  this  giving  "  the  time  of  day  "  ?     Hero 
are  other  instances  :  — 

(Enter  Clarence  guarded,  and  Brakenbury.) 
Glosler.     Brother,  good  day. 

Packard  III.  I.  1. 

Hastings.     Good  time  of  day  unto  my  gracious  lord. 
Gloster.     As  much  unto  my  good  lord  chamberlain. 

Richard  III.  I.  1. 


42  HAMLET'S   NOTE-BOOK. 

Buckingham  (to  Queen  Elizabeth).     Good  time  of  day  unto 
your  royal  grace.  —  Richard  III  I.  3. 

King  Henry.     Health  and  fair  time  of  day. 

Henry  V.  V.  2. 

These  quotations  distinctly  prove  that  in  the 
reigns  of  Elizabeth  and  James  people  could 
"  give  the  time  of  day,"  "  be  it  in  the  morn,"  or 
be  it  when  it  might,  without  saying  either  "  good 
morrow "  or  "  good  even,"  All  that  the  pas- 
sage cited  from  Henry  VI.  shows  is,  that  in  the 
morning,  far  more  than  in  the  afternoon,  people 
were  wont  to  give  each  other  salutation  by  say- 
ing, "  The  good  time  of  day  to  you,  sir,"  "  Fair 
time  of  day,  sir,"  "  Good  day,  sir,"  etc.  In  point 
of  fact  the  reviewer  merely  makes  an  exhibition 
of  himself  in  this  matter.  He  might  easily  have 
known  that  Mrs.  Pott's  position  was  not  to  be 
whiffled  away  by  a  gust  of  rude  epithets  and 
empty  assertions.  Her  case  is  a  strong  one. 
She  finds  the  salutation  "  good  morrow  "  in  the 
Shakespeare  plays  nearly  a  hundred  times ;  in 
over  six  thousand  volumes  of  that  period  which 
she  has  examined,  she  finds  it  only  about  thirty 
times,  mainly  in  authors  under  the  influence  of 
Bacon.  The  inference  is  therefore  manifestly 
not  strained  that  the  form  was  not  in  general 
use  then  as  a  salutation,  and  that  as  a  distinc- 
tively early  morning  salutation  it  began  with 
the  Promus  and  Roraeo  and  Juliet^  where  it 
would  seem  to  be  first  found.  Whoever  affirms 
to  the  contrary  is  bound  to  advance  reasons,  not 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  43 

abuse,  in  support  of  the  affirmation.  Failure  to 
do  this  leaves  Mrs.  Pott  in  possession  of  her 
ground  ;  namely,  that  there  is  a  palpable  connec- 
tion between  the  forms  of  salutation  in  the  Pi^o- 
mus  and  those  in  the  play. 

This  is  the  summit  of  our  Mont  Blanc,  but  it 
has  its  acme.  After  the  famous  victory  won  by 
his  Shakespearean  quotation  on  the  "  good  mor- 
row "  question,  the  reviewer  politely  remarks 
that  "  we  have,  however,  not  yet  seen  the  extreme 
of  the  ignorance  which  is  displayed  "  by  the  lady 
editor  of  the  Promus.  "  The  extreme  of  the 
ignorance"  is  in  her  discussion  of  Promus  en- 
try 1200,  which  is  simply  the  mysterious  word 
"  rome,"  and  it  is  really  a  wonder  that  on  this 
point,  where  she  is  clearly  and  even  indisputably 
right,  Mr.  White  should  have  stopped  short  of 
classifying  her  with  the  Scotch  idiots  or  the  cre- 
tins of  the  Alps.  It  has  been  suggested  to  her, 
she  remarks,  that  the  entry,  being  orthographi- 
cally  identical  with  the  Greek  word  for  strength 
(rome),  may  be  a  memorandum  to  connect  that 
element  with  the  name  of  Romeo,  in  the  shape 
of  making  him  a  type  of  strong  or  violent  love. 
x\s  this  is  exactly  the  creation  which  is  effected 
in  the  play,  the  character  of  Romeo  being  a 
new  and  splendid  study  of  the  physiology  of 
young  passion,  with  its  "  violent  delights  "  and 
"violent  ends,"  there  is  obviously  a  degree  of 
quaint  force  in  the  suggestion,  all  the  more 
since  this  presumable  memorandum    of   an  ele- 


44  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

ment  to  be  wrouoht  into  the  type  of  love  created 
in  the  figure  of  Romeo  stands  in  the  neighbor- 
hood  of  the  Promiis  entries  which  reappear  in 
the  play.  Mrs.  Pott,  however,  rejects  the  sug- 
gestion, noting  as  an  objection  to  it  that  the 
mark  over  the  e  in  "  rome  "  does  not  properly 
denote  quantity,  but  is  a  sign  of  abbreviation, 
and  intimating,  perhaps  with  undue  brevity, 
her  belief  that  the  word  may  have  been  in- 
tended as  a  hint  for  the  name  of  the  bride- 
groom. At  this  modest  expression  of  opinion, 
Mr.  White's  rhetoric  can  be  said  to  fairly  get  up 
on  end  and  howl.  A  hint  for  the  name  of  the 
bridesfroom  !  "If  what  we  have  seen  before  is 
amazing,  the  gravity  of  this  is  astounding."  He 
has  already  denounced  the  proposition  as  "  the 
extreme  of  ignorance,"  and  by  way  of  showing 
that  it  is  so,  he  proceeds,  amidst  much  rhetorical 
expression  of  contempt  and  amazement,  to  assert 
that  any  one  who  "  has  the  slightest  and  most 
superficial  acquaintance  with  the  origin  of  Shake- 
speare's plays"  knows  that  the  name  was  fur- 
nished by  Arthur  Brooke's  poem  of  1562  ;  that 
it  came  into  that  poem  from  a  story  which  had 
been  told  and  retold  for  generations  ;  and  that 
it  "  was  settled  in  Italy  centuries  before  Bacon 
or  Shakespeare  could  write  it."  The  "  extreme 
of  ignorance  "  is  undoubtedly  a  bad  thing,  but 
what  may  the  extreme  of  impudence  be?  Let 
us  see  how  a  reviewer  can  handle  facts.  The 
Italian    novel    of   Luigi    da  Porto,   from  which 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  45 

Brooke  derived  his  poem,  and  in  which  the  hero 
and  heroine  are  first  called  Romeo  and  Julietta, 
dates  in  its  second  edition  from  1535  —  an  ear- 
lier edition,  \^dtllout  date,  having  been  published 
shortly  before.  Between  the  publication,  there- 
fore, which  first  uses  the  name  of  Romeo,  and 
the  play,  there  is  an  interval  of  about  sixty 
years.  This  is  what  Mr.  White  calls  "  centu- 
ries "  !  He  says  the  name  was  settled  in  Italy 
*^for  centuries,"  when  he  knew  very  well  that  it 
was  first  "  settled  "  by  da  Porto  about  sixty  years 
before  the  play.  This  style  of  dealing  with  veri- 
ties continues  in  the  assertion  of  the  fixity  of  the 
hero's  name,  —  a  fixity  so  absolute,  Mr.  White 
would  have  us  believe,  as  to  make  "  a  hint  for 
the  name  of  the  bridegroom  "  in  a  Promus  note 
perfectly  nonsensical.  In  the  older  novel  of 
Massuccio  (1476),  which  appears  to  be  the  germ 
of  the  story,  and  has  not  much  in  common 
with  da  Porto's  version  or  that  of  the  play,  the 
hero  is  called  Mariotto  ;  in  Painter's  rendering 
into  English  of  a  French  version  (1567),  he  ap- 
pears as  Rhomio ;  and  in  Brooke's  poem  (1562), 
he  is  named  Romeus,  and  occasionally  Romeo. 
These  varying  orthographies  charmingly  bear  out 
Mr.  White's  bold  assertion  that  the  name  was 
"  settled."  It  is  plain  enough  to  anybody,  not 
having  a  contract  on  hand  to  murder  a  heretical 
book,  that  Mrs.  Pott  means  that  Bacon's  Pro- 
mus note  is  a  hint  to  make  "  Romeo  "  the  name 
of  the  hero  in  the  play,  rather  than  "  Mariotto," 


46  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

"Rhomio,"  or  "  Romeus,"  and  Mr.  White's 
ajffected  uproar  over  her  remark  is  perfectly  ri- 
diculous. 

What  he  says  further  about  the  "  rome  "  en- 
try is  worse  than  ridiculous.  It  is  somewhat 
surprising,  in  view  of  Mrs.  Pott's  clear  appre- 
hension of  the  significance  of  the  mark  over 
the  e  in  this  word,  that  she  should  not  have 
seized  the  advantage  ready  to  her  hand,  and 
demonstrated  beyond  cavil  the  one  only  meaning 
of  the  entry,  instead  of  resting  in  a  suggestion 
which  is  of  the  briefest.  It  is  plain  that  the 
mark  over  the  e  is  a  sign  of  abbreviation,  for 
the  instances  are  endless  of  its  employment  in 
Elizabethan  and  much  later  orthography  to  de- 
note the  elision  of  a  letter.  For  example,  in  the 
often  quoted  passage  from  Meres'  Palladis  Ta- 
mia  (1598),  we  find :  "  As  Plautus  and  Seneca 
are  accounted  best  for  tragedy  and  comedy 
among  the  Latins,  so  Shakespeare  among  ye 
English  is  the  most  excellent  in  both  kinds  for 
the  stage  ;  for  comedy  witness  his  Getleme  of 
Verona,"  etc.  Here,  in  two  instances,  the  letter 
n  is  elided  from  the  word  "  Gentlemen,"  and  the 
elision  noted  by  the  mark  over  the  preceding 
vowel.  Is  there  any  doubt  that  "  Getleme " 
stands  for  "  Gentlemen  "  ?  Then  why  does  not 
"  rome  "  stand  for  "  romeo  "  ?  Obviously  and 
palpably  it  does  stand  for  "  romeo,"  and  for 
nothing  else,  because  the  mark  over  the  e  indi- 
cates the  omission  of  a  letter,  and  there  is  not 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  47 

a  letter  in  the  alphabet  except  o  which  will 
make  "  rome "  into  a  known  word.  Let  the 
reader  try  for  himself.  The  significance  of  the 
point  is  simply  tremendous,  and  nobody  knew  it 
better  than  Mr.  White,  as  his  shuffling  and  blus- 
terino^  manner  in  dealino;  with  the  matter  shows. 
Making  due  account  of  the  mark  of  abbrevia- 
tion,  here  in  a  manuscript  of  Lord  Bacon's,  in 
his  own  handwriting,  and  in  the  midst  of  a 
string  of  entries  reproduced  in  the  play,  is  the 
name,  Romeo  !  It  occurs  in  a  note-book,  the 
title  of  which  denotes  that  it  is  a  storehouse  of 
materials  for  literary  use,  and  for  literary  use  it 
is  obviously  there.  No  straw  ever  showed  more 
definitely  the  way  the  wind  blows.  It  will  not 
do  for  the  reviewer  to  assume  that  the  mark 
over  the  e  is  a  sign  of  accentuation,  and  skate 
off,  as  he  does,  into  the  far-fetched  and  puerile 
suggestion  that  Bacon  possibly  made  the  entry 
as  it  stands  to  indicate  the  proper  pronunciation 
of  the  lover's  name  in  the  ante-Shakespearean 
poem  of  Ronieus  and  Juliet.  The  mark  is  a 
mark  of  abbreviation,  and  nothing  else,  and  Mr. 
White  knew  enough  of  Elizabethan  orthography 
to  know  how  often,  and  just  what  for,  and  only 
just  what  for,  the  mark  was  used.  For  exam- 
ple :  — 

In  consideracon.  —  Promus,  1380. 
A  good  or  yll  f oundacou.  —  Promus,  1453. 

By  by  lullaby 

Rockyd  I  my  child, 

In  a  dre  late  as  I  lay 

Methought  I  heard  a  maiden  say,  etc. 

Donee's  Ilhmtraliona. 


48  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

May  lieap  more  harm  upo  thy  head. 

The  sudry  shapes  of  death  whose  dart  shall  make  my  flesh  to 
treble. 

The  hungry  fleas  that  frisk  so  fresh  to  worms  I  can  copare. 

George  Gascoigne. 
Abstract  of  the  Deposicons  of  ye  witnesses  sworne  touching 
ye  speeches  of  John  Paget.  —  Lord  Burleigh's  Papers,  British 
Museum,  quoted  in  Notes  and  Queries. 

Mr.  White,  not  being  able  in  the  face  of  the 
facts  to  deny  that  the  mark  over  the  e  in 
"  rome  "  indicates  abbreviation,  and  that  o  is 
the  only  letter  that  can  supply  the  hiatus,  could 
hardly  maintain  before  a  rational  jury  his  dog- 
matic assertion  that  "  rome  "  has  nothins:  to  do 
with  "  Romeo." 

He  fares  no  better  when  he  passes  from  par- 
ticulars to  generals,  although  on  one  point  he  is 
really  admirable,  and  deserves  a  cordial  acknowl- 
edgment of  the  cogent  good  sense  of  his  reason- 
ing. I  refer  to  his  brief  demonstration  that 
Bacon  could  not  have  possibly  written  the  Son- 
nets. The  considerations  he  advances  are  man- 
ifestly conclusive,  especially  those  Avhich  relate 
to  the  palpable  chasm  between  the  lofty  moral 
nature  and  natural  chastity  of  Bacon,  and  the 
experiences  of  the  court  gallant  and  voluptuary 
which  are  mirrored  in  a  number  of  these  com- 
positions. He  might  have  gone  further,  and 
shown  that  their  autobiographic  revelations  are 
no  less  incompatible  with  the  history  of  Bacon's 
life.     But  although   his   reasons  justify  him  in 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  49 

declaring  that  "  Bacon  certainly  did  not  write 
tiie  Sonnets,"  he  goes  very  fast  and  far  when 
he  adds,  "  and  therefore  as  certainly  he  did  not 
write  the  plays."  His  object  is  to  make  the  one 
work  contingent  upon  the  other,  so  that  when 
the  Sonnets  are  logically  whisked  away,  the  un- 
fortunate Baconian  will  be  also  left  without  the 
drama,  and  see  with  mental  anguish  both  revert 
by  syllogism  to  "  that  greenhorn  Shakespeare," 
as  Shelley  calls  him.  The  prosperity  of  this 
neat  little  scheme  is  quite  balked,  however,  by 
advancing  the  fact  that  the  autobiographic  dis- 
closures of  the  Sonnets,  already  referred  to, 
show  William  Shakespeare  even  less  than  Fran- 
cis Bacon ;  so  that,  according  to  Mr.  White's 
formula,  if  William  Shakespeare  certainly  did 
not  write  the  Sonnets,  he  as  certainly  did  not 
write  the  plays.  To  keep  out  of  this  scrape  is 
clearly  Mr.  White's  interest,  and  an  item  of  his 
effort  is  to  assert  that  Meres  mentions  these  com- 
positions in  1598  as  "  Shakespeare's  sugred  son- 
nets among  his  private  friends."  "  Sugared," 
indeed  !  Such  a  barley -candy  epithet  might 
describe  the  verses  in  the  Passionate  PUgrim, 
but  not  that  array  of  mysterious  and  magnifi- 
cent poems  published  eleven  years  after  Meres's 
reference,  with  their  powerful  concision,  their 
condensed  expression,  their  vigorous  reverted 
and  foreshortened  style,  their  sumptuous  and 
often  Gongorian  metonymies,  their  stately  mas- 
culine   rhythmus,   their    dominant   tone    of   sad 


50  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

maturity,  their  rich  and  mournful  beauty,  then- 
sombre  tenderness,  their  prevailing  sorrow,  their 
dark  resignation,  their  proud  and  solemn  bitter- 
ness, their  bursts  of  righteous  anger  and  disdain. 
It  must  have  been  a  very  different  kind  of  sugar 
that  went  round  among  Shakespeare's  friends  in 
1598.  To  make  the  question  of  authorship  as 
between  Bacon  and  Shakespeare  hinge  upon  the 
Sonnets  is  not  quite  prudent,  when,  beyond  the 
vague  and  irrelevant  reference  of  Meres,  there 
is  not  one  scrap  of  reason  for  assuming  that 
William  Shakespeare  of  Stratford  had  anything 
to  do  with  them.  They  were  not  even  ascribed 
to  him  in  their  publication  in  1G09.  The  title- 
page  reads  simply  "  Shake-Speare's  Sonnets,"  — 
a  punning  inscrijjtion.  It  is  not  "  Sonnets  by 
William  Shakespeare,"  which  would  at  least  be 
prima  facie  evidence  of  authorship,  meaning, 
however,  no  more  than  it  means  in  the  case 
of  "  A  Yorkshire  Tragedy,  by  William  Shake- 
speare," a  title-page  which  persuades  nobody 
that  he  wrote  that  play.  Instead,  there  is  a 
manifest  nom  de  jylume  —  a  compound  name 
made  from  the  suggestion  of  a  lance  brandished 
—  "  Shake-Speare."  Under  this  title  the  Son- 
nets appeared  in  1609,  and  considering  their 
singular  contents,  no  less  than  the  titular  ascrip- 
tion to  a  mere  pun,  the  jump  to  the  conclusion 
that  they  were  the  composition  of  WilHam 
Shakespeare  is  certainly  surprising.  It  is  a  jump 
that  has  also  proved  fatal  to  any  rational  under- 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  51 

standing"  of  the  Sonnets  themselves.  William 
Shakespeare  once  declared  their  author,  and  the 
keys  of  the  riddles  were  searched  for  only  in  the 
Stratford  cupboards,  when  they  lay  in  other 
cabinets,  and  in  an  entirely  dili'erent  direction. 
The  first  enigma  which  the  prepossession  made 
insoluble  was  the  dedication :  "  To  the  onlie 
beg'etter  of  these  ensuing  Sonnets,  Mr.  W.  H.," 
etc.  Shakesi3eare  having  been  immutably  fixed 
as  the  author,  it  was  concluded  that  the  "  onlie 
begetter  "  must  be  the  person  addressed  in  the 
Sonnets,  —  that  is,  the  person  who  inspired  him 
to  write  them ;  and  wildly  acrobatic  have  been 
the  feats  of  guessing  on  this  sapient  premise, 
from  William  Herbert  to  William  Himself,  which 
last  is  a  recent  German  contribution.  To  make 
these  antics  more  preposterous,  one  finds  upon 
examination  that  the  Sonnets  are  addressed  to  or 
inspired  by  at  least  four  persons,  —  a  beautiful 
young  man  of  stainless  life  ;  a  beautiful  young 
man  who  is  a  thorough  libertine ;  a  woman  so 
fair  that  the  lily  and  the  red  and  white  rose  are 
brought  into  compare  with  her  complexion  ;  and 
a  woman  so  unquestionably  brunette  that  she  is 
called  black ;  four  "  onlie  begetters "  on  the 
face  of  it !  Then  what  becomes  of  the  one 
"  onlie  begetter "  theory  of  the  dedication  ? 
Congruity,  however,  is  nothing  to  your  true 
Shakespearean,  and  despite  the  contradiction, 
the  delvers  on  the  false  lead  stubbornly  toiled 
on.     After  all,  prejudgments  once  barred,  the 


52  HAMLET'S   NOTE-BOOK. 

clew  is  a  very  pl.ilu  one.  The  only  begetter  of 
a  child  is  its  father.  By  parity  of  reasoning-,  the 
only  begetter  of  a  sonnet  is  its  antlior.  The 
sonnets  are  therefore  dedicated  to  their  author. 
"  To  the  only  begetter  (or  sole  author)  of  these 
ensuing  sonnets,  Mr.  W.  H.,  all  luii)piness,  and 
that  eternity  promised  by  our  ever-living  poet, 
wisheth  the  well-wishing  adventurer  (or  person 
undertaking  the  enterprise  of  launching  them 
for  posterity),  in  setting  forth.  T.  T."  So  runs 
the  dedication.  Who  now  are  the  author  and 
adventurer  thus  indicated  in  cipher  ?  The  au- 
thor is  Raleigh,  —  \N alter  raleigR  ;  the  ad- 
venturer the  mathematician  Hariot,  —  Thomas 
HABioT,  his  friend  and  companion,  allowed  free 
access  to  him  during  his  imprisonment  in  the 
Tower,  which  covers  the  date  of  the  Sonnets, 
1609.  The  means  and  leisure  necessary  to  es- 
tablish these  assertions  beyond  cavil,  and  spread 
open  the  meaning  of  the  Sonnets,  will  probably 
never  be  at  the  command  of  the  writer,  but  pa- 
tient and  candid  scholars,  better  situated,  will 
not  be  unofrateful  for  these  offered  clews.  Thev 
will  find  them  confirmed  by  the  slender  yet  defi- 
nite outlines  of  autobiography  which  the  Son- 
nets contain.  The  allusions  of  the  author  to  his 
overweening  pride  in  himself,  to  his  inordinate 
love  of  outward  adornment,  his  jewels,  his  sin- 
gularly costly  apparel ;  the  allusions,  at  another 
stage,  to  his  poverty,  to  his  physical  lameness,  to 
his  advanced  age,  to  his  drained  blood,  and  his 


HAMLET'S   NOTE-BOOK.  53 

brow,  trenched  and  wrinkled  by  time  ;  the  allu- 
sion to  his  deeply  tanned  complexion,  the  in- 
grained sunburn  of  the  field  and  the  voyage ; 
the  iterated  expression  of  bitter  regret  at  having 
been  swerved  from  poetry  as  the  great  purpose 
or  passion  of  his  life,  and  diverted  to  motley 
pursuits  and  employments ;  the  expression  of 
passionate  satisfaction  in  the  achievements  of 
another  poet,  apparently  Spenser  ;  the  incredu- 
lous or  ironical  allusion,  in  vaunting  devotion  to 
the  quest  of  truth  as  the  aim  of  life,  to  Bacon's 
new-found  methods  and  strange  compounds  of 
philosophy  and  poetry,  as  sketched  in  the  De 
Aiigmentis ;  the  allusion  to  himself  as  having 
been  one  of  the  wardens  of  the  Cinque  Ports ; 
the  probable  allusion  to  that  great  Earl  of  Nor- 
thumberland, celebrated  for  his  beauty  and 
learning,  confined  in  the  Tower  with  Raleigh, 
with  one  of  his  "  Magi,"  his  salaried  scholar, 
William  Hews,  allowed  access  to  him  ("a  man 
in  hue  all  Hews  in  his  controlling  ")  ;  the  refer- 
ence to  the  guilt  imputed  to  himself,  the  public 
scandal,  the  irretrievable  disgrace,  the  irremedi- 
able brand  upon  his  name ;  the  reference  to  his 
expectation  of  a  bloody  death  at  the  hands  of 
the  public  executioner ;  the  lion-roar  of  the 
CXXVth  Sonnet  at  "  the  suborned  informer  ; " 
all  this,  and  much  more,  impossible  of  connec- 
tion with  Shakespeare,  confirm  the  assertion  of 
Raleigh  as  the  author  of  these  strange  and 
splendid   poems,  —  how    strange    and    splendid, 


54  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

hov7  characteristic  and  indicative  as  an  illustra- 
tion of  the  EHzabethan  age,  full  commentary 
only  can  disclose. 

To  assist  this  commentary,  I  will  briefly  add 
that  the  Sonnets  make  a  leaf  in  the  book  of 
England's  intellectual  debt  to  Italy.  They  are 
largely  a  collection  of  personal  poems,  but 
plentifully  interspersed  with  poems  which  are 
invocations,  apostrophes,  plaints,  meditations, 
connected  with  the  personification  of  a  divine 
purpose,  deeply  cherished,  though  not  always 
pursued  through  life ;  and  the  main  key  to  them, 
and  to  much  of  the  early  Elizabethan  literature, 
is  in  the  writings  of  their  contemporary,  the 
friend  of  Sidney,  Raleigh,  Spenser,  and  that 
group,  the  noble  and  ardent  Giordano  Bruno. 
It  is  his  Eroici  Fwori,  a  work  of  mingled 
prose  and  verse,  which  is  in  special  relation. 
A  word  here  is  necessary.  In  our  age,  there 
are  men  and  women  who  accept  with  composure 
lives  of  disaster,  reproach,  contumely,  ostracism, 
the  rancor  of  enslavers  and  plutocrats,  the  jail 
of  Garrison,  Krapotkine's  dungeon,  the  prisons 
of  Blanqui,  Mazzini's  exile,  the  gallows  of  John 
Brown,  the  torture  and  the  scaffold  of  the  Nihil- 
ists, Siberia,  Lambessa,  the  galleys,  the  knout, 
the  guillotine,  all  for  the  love  of  that  fair 
woman  in  the  Phrygian  cap,  with  the  broken 
shackles  in  her  hand,  whom  we  call  Liberty. 
The  sixteenth  century  in  England  and  the  Con- 
tinent had    a    similar   personification,    pontifical 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  55 

over  a  host  of  secret  worshippers.  It  was  Truth, 
She  was  miaijed  in  the  Hterature  of  her  lovers 
as  a  celestial  woman,  a  goddess.  Into  art,  into 
science,  into  literature,  into  religion,  into  politics, 
through  all  the  mazes  of  the  False,  this  vision 
forever  floated  before  then*  following  feet ;  and 
they  followed,  although  the  inquisitor  started  out 
at  times  upon  their  path,  although  behind  them 
stalked  the  headsman.  In  the  Eroici  Furori 
of  Bruno  (my  statement  is  from  old  remem- 
brance), the  thesis  is  that  absorption  in  mere 
amative  love,  the  prevailing  vice  of  that  in- 
tensely amorous  age,  is  unworthy  of  one  so  great 
as  the  human  being.  Be  lovers  indeed,  he  says, 
but  love  in  subordination  to  a  celestial  love, 
the  only  affection  worthy  of  the  complete  sur- 
render of  a  human  soul,  the  love  for  the  truth. 
The  search  for  what  is  truo  in  all  the  domains 
of  thought  and  life  is  the  glory  of  existence ; 
and  then  in  alternate  eloquent  prose  and  glow- 
ing verse,  he  chooses  for  the  image  of  this  doc- 
trine the  great  chaste  huntress,  Diana.  We  all 
know  of  the  Dian  of  Giordano  Bruno.  He  died 
for  her,  like  a  man,  unfaltering,  unrecanting, — 
he  died  for  her  the  martyr's  death  of  fire  in  the 
great  square  at  Rome.  After  his  visit  to  Eng- 
land, his  indoctrination  of  the  Raleigh  group 
flowers  thickly  in  their  poetry,  and  his  Dian  ap- 
pears as  the  divinity  of  their  worship.  A  choir 
of  unread  or  forgotten  singers  utter  their  hymns 
to  this  personification.     Spenser,  the  greatest  of 


56  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

them  all,  weaves  it  into  his  Faery  Queen.  Tn 
his  preface,  he  explains  that  he  gives  her  the 
name  of  Gloriana,  but  shadows  her  as  Bel- 
Phoebe,  and  again  as  Raleigh's  Cynthia,  "  Phoebo 
and  Cynthia,"  he  says,  "  being  both  names  for 
Diana."  "  Your  own  excellent  conception  of 
Cjmthia,"  he  calls  it,  addressing  Raleigh ;  and  in 
the  dedicatory  sonnet,  glorifying  Raleigh  as  the 
great  coming  poet  of  the  time,  and  the  only  one 
fit  to  treat  so  high  a  theme  as  the  Faery 
Queen,  he  says  until  the  latter  makes  known 
his  poem,  let  the  praises  of  this  Cynthia,  or 
Diana,  be  thus  inadequately  celebrated.  The 
"  Rosalinde  "  to  whom  Spenser  addresses  such 
rapturous  verse,  explaining  in  a  note  that  her 
name,  "  rightly  ordered,"  will  show  who  she  is, 
a  problem  which  has  vainly  perplexed  the  critics, 
is  the  same  goddess ;  "  Rosalinde "  being  an 
anagram,  which,  "rightly  ordered,"  yields  the 
words  "  or  els  [else]  Dian  "  —  the  Dian  of  his 
master,  Bruno.  It  is  the  same  Dian,  the  hella 
donna  of  the  Eroki  Fur  or  I,  that  makes  the 
personification  in  a  number  of  the  Shakespeare 
Sonnets  ;  the  celestial  image  of  "  truth  in  beauty 
dyed,"  whom  the  author  so  often  reproaches 
his  muse  for  having  neglected.  All  this  being 
so,  Mr.  White's  destructive  syllogism  becomes 
as  inoperative  as  a  battering-ram  made  of  calves- 
foot  jelly. 

"  The  great  inherent  absurdity,"  however,  of 
all  the  absurdities  with  which  he  deals  so  brill- 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  57 

iantly,  he  finds,  finally,  in  "  the  unlikeness  of 
Bacon's  mind  and  style  to  those  of  the  writer 
of  the  plays."  Of  all  fudge  ever  written,  this 
is  the  sheerest.  Methinks  I  see  our  critic  with 
his  sagacious  right  eye  fixed  upon  the  long  lop- 
ing alexandrines  of  Richelieu,  and  his  sagacious 
left  eye  fixed  upon  Richelieu's  llaxims  of  State, 
oracularly  deciding  from  the  "  unlikeness  of 
mind  and  style  "  that  the  great  Cardinal  could 
not  have  written  the  tragi-comedy  of  3Iirame  I 
Could  he  inform  us  (I  will  offer  the  most  favor- 
ing instance  possible)  what  likeness  of  "  mind 
and  style "  he  could  detect  between  Sir  Wil- 
liam Blackstone's  charming  verses,  A  Laioyer^s 
Farewell  to  Ids  Muse,  and  the  same  Sir  Wil- 
liam Blackstone's  Coimuentat^les  f  What  like- 
ness of  "mind  and  style"  could  he  establish 
between  the  famous  treatise  by  Grotius  on  The 
R'lfjlits  of  Peace  and  War,  and  the  stately 
tragedy  by  Grotius,  entitled  Adam  in  Exile  ? 
Where  is  the  identity  of  "  mind  and  style  "  be- 
tween Sir  Walter  Raleigh's  dryasdust  Cabinet 
Council  and  Sir  Walter  Raleigh's  magnificent 
and  ringing  poem,  Tlie  Soid's  Errand  ?  What 
likeness  of  "  mind  and  style  "  could  he  find 
between  Coleridge's  Aids  to  Reflection  and  the 
unearthly  bronze  melodies  and  magian  imagery 
of  Coleridge's  Kuhla  Khan  f  What  likeness  of 
"mind  and  style"  exists  between  the  exquisite 
riant  grace,  lightness,  and  Watteau-color  of  Mil- 
ton's Allegro,  the  gracious   andante  movement 


68  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

and  sweet  cloistral  imagery  of  Milton's  Pense- 
7'oso,  and  the  Tetrachordon  or  the  Areopagi- 
tica  of  the  same  John  Milton  ?  Are  the  solemn 
rollino-  harmonies  of  Paradise  Lost  one  in 
"  mind  and  style  "  with  the  trip-hammer  crash 
of  the  reply  to  Salmasius  by  Cromwell's  Latin 
secretary  ?  Could  the  most  astute  reviewer  dis- 
cover likeness  of  "  mind  and  style "  between 
Peregrine  Pickle  or  PoderHck  Random,  and 
the  noble  and  majestic  passion  of  the  Ode  to  In- 
dependence  ?  — 

Thy  spirit,  Independence,  let  me  share, 
Lord  of  the  lion-heart  and  eagle-eye  ! 
Thy  steps  I  '11  follow  with  my  bosoui  bare, 

Nor  heed  the  storm  that  howls  along-  the  sky!  — 

lines  which  make  one  almost  reoret  that  Smollett 
was  diverted  from  the  domain  where  he  mioht 
have  been  a  great  poet,  into  the  lower  field  of 
the  first-class  realistic  novelist.  Of  all  proposi- 
tions I  ever  heard,  this  of  Mr.  White's  passes  — 
that  a  man  must  show  the  same  "  mind  and 
style  "  in  writing  science  and  philosophy  that  he 
does  in  writing  poetry  !  To  make  it  still  more 
ridiculous,  it  must  be  remembered  in  the  in- 
stance under  discussion,  that  Bacon  had  to  exert 
the  utmost  diplomatic  finesse  to  steer  his  philo- 
sophic thought  clear  of  the  insane  prepossessions 
and  prejudices  of  his  tune  ;  that  nearly  his  whole 
life  was  spent,  as  the  preliminary  compositions 
show,  in  painfully  laboring  out  the  phraseology 
which   should   at  once  conceal  and  reveal  the 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  59 

meaning-  of  the  De  Aiigmentis  and  the  Novum 
Orgcumini,  make  them  demiurgic  with  intelli- 
gence, and  at  the  same  time  carry  them  over 
without  suspicion,  past  the  military  despotism 
of  his  time,  to  the  freer  ages ;  and  that  then, 
when  all  this  was  done,  they,  like  nearly  all  his 
other  works,  were  written  in  Latin  !  The  Ad- 
vancement of  Learniny,  with  its  guarded  mili- 
tary reconnoissance  as  into  an  enemy's  country, 
and  the  Essays,  where,  with  the  habitual  labo- 
riousness,  the  literary  effort  is  to  pack  the 
thought  into  the  closest  compass,  and  the  native 
mental  traits  are  fettered  by  sententiousness,  are 
the  only  main  exceptions.  It  is  manifest  that 
one  might  reasonably  exj^ect  to  find  a  rather  dif- 
ferent show  of  "  mind  and  style  "  between  Bacon 
writing  in  his  own  person,  under  such  con- 
ditions, and  Bacon  writing  anonymously  and  un- 
restrained ;  between  Bacon  with  his  intellectual 
motions  cooped  up  in  his  History  of  Henry  the 
Seventh,  and  Bacon  with  all  the  tempest  of  his 
spirit  unloosed  in  Hamlet  or  Lear. 

Mr.  White's  next  feat,  by  way  of  showing  the 
"  uniikeness  of  mind  and  style,"  is  to  make  a 
parallel  between  Bacon  and  Shakespeare,  after 
the  manner  of  the  famous  parallel  between  Pope 
and  Dryden.  But  it  is  not  so  good.  In  fact, 
his  gymnastics  in  playing  this  precious  game  of 
hop-scotch  are  of  the  most  grotesque  character. 
Bacon,  he  leads  oft",  was  a  "  cautious  observer 
and    investigator,"    etc. ;    Shakespeare,    on    the 


GO  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

contrary,  he  continues,  saw  everything  at  once 
and  forever,  outside  and  inside,  all  in  a  ilj^sh,  by 
inspiration,  etc. ',  the  fact  being  that  the  deli- 
cate, minute,  painstaking,  and  absolutely  scien- 
tific observation  and  investigation  of  men  and 
things  shown  in  the  plays  are  patent  to  every 
reader  !  Bacon,  continues  Shakespeare's  Scholar, 
was  a  "  logician  ;  "  Shakespeare  "  soared  upon 
wings."  Bacon  a  logician  !  I  defy  any  one  to 
show  me  one  instance  of  the  major  and  minor 
premise  in  all  his  writings  !  Did  the  reviewer 
forget  the  blasting  criticism  on  logic  as  compel- 
ling assent,  but  leaving  things  unaltered  ?  Did 
he  forget  the  famous  rejection  of  the  syllogism, 
carried  in  the  profound  affirmation  that  Nature 
is  more  subtle  than  logic  ?  Bacon  a  logician, 
indeed !  Truly  it  may  be  said  both  of  him  and 
Shakespeare,  that  equally  they  never  argue ; 
they  decree.  Bacon  next  appears  in  the  parallel 
as  with  a  perpetual  bias  to  the  good ;  Shake- 
speare holds  "  fast  both  to  good  and  evil,"  "  de- 
lighting in  his  Falstaff  as  much  as  he  delighted 
in  his  Imogen,"  —  which  is  news  indeed.  Fal- 
staff, whom  Victor  Hugo  felicitously  calls  "the 
centaur  of  the  hog,"  is,  in  the  Merry  Wives  of 
Windsor,  and  in  the  historical  plays,  held  up 
by  his  creator  to  merciless  ridicule,  made  a  gross 
butt  and  laughing-stock,  mocked,  flouted,  fooled, 
cudgelled,  deserted,  and  dies  with  poetic  justice 
a  gruesome  and  melancholy  death.  Yet  Mr. 
White  would  make  out  that  he  is  a  cherished 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  61 

ideal  of  the  author,  like  Imogen,  inasmuch  as 
Shakespeare  loves  evil  as  much  as  good,  and 
verges,  we  are  told  further  on,  almost  to  "  moral 
obliquity  !  "  However,  a  few  sentences  distant, 
he  has  him  bravely  rehabilitated  as  "  a  moral 
teacher,"  and  "  ever  moralizing."  To  one  who 
remembers  the  Juvenalian  blasts  of  Thnon,  the 
terrible  and  more  than  Roman  condemnation 
of  the  sins  and  evils  of  his  time  in  Lear,  the 
marble  justice  of  Measure  for  Measure,  the  im- 
mense and  sensitive  conscience  active  everywhere 
in  the  plays,  the  idea  that  Shakespeare  has  a 
less  determined  bias  to  the  gfood  than  Bacon 
strikes  me  as  a  point  in  discovery  not  excelled 
since  Christopher  Columbus.  Next  we  have  it 
that  Bacon  asserts  his  personality  in  his  writuigs, 
Shakespeare  never,  —  which  is  "  clean  kam,"  for 
the  whole  nature  of  the  author  of  the  plays  is 
revealed  by  them,  and  yields  a  reciprocal  impres- 
sion to  the  reader's  mind,  just  as  in  the  palin- 
genesis the  rose  yielded  to  the  air  above  it,  the 
glowing  phantom  of  the  rose.  In  earlier  life, 
when  all  the  future  smiled  for  him,  he  has 
shown  the  kind  of  man  he  was  in  gracious  and 
lordly  characters  like  Duke  Theseus ;  in  later 
years,  with  all  the  problems  of  the  disjointed 
social  state,  of  impending  anarchy,  and  of  un- 
intelligible Time  and  Life  rising  around  him, 
sphinxine  and  terrible,  he  has  shown  his  soul 
in  the  impersonated  reason,  the  passionate  in- 
terrogations, the  sad  laughter,  and  the  deep  in- 


62  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

terior  grief  of  Hamlet.  I  think  that  amount 
of  judgment  which  has  not  flown  to  Shake- 
speare's Scholars,  will  easily  see  in  the  drama  the 
true  self  of  the  author,  even  throuoh  the  veilino- 
of  the  dramatic  form.  In  regard  to  the  next 
parallel,  in  which  Bacon  appears  as  the  "  most 
exact,"  and  Shakespeare  the  "  most  inexact  "  of 
writers,  I  will  only  remark  that  I  suppose  this  is 
the  reason  Avhy  they  both  make  the  very  same 
mistakes  in  their  science  and  literary  allusions, 
and  have  the  same  correctness  in  the  g-reater 
number  of  instances.  Of  the  ensuing:  alle^a- 
tion,  also,  briefly  that  Bacon  is  stiff  and  for- 
mal, and  Shakespeare  without  constraint,  it  is 
only  necessary  to  say,  this  being  a  part  of  the 
"  mind  and  style  "  indictment,  that  it  is  permit- 
ted to  Machiavel  to  be  stiff  and  formal  in  his 
treatise.  The  Prince,  and  free  and  easy  in  his 
comedy.  The  Mandragola.  But  Mr.  White  ap- 
pears to  think  that  if  Bacon  were  the  author 
of  Shakespeare,  his  inquiry  into  the  nature  of 
heat  would  necessarily  be  written  in  the  style  of 
Twelfth  Night !  He  next  gives  us  Shakespeare 
as  "a  player  and  quibbler  "  with  words,  in  ab- 
solute contrast  with  Bacon,  who  in  this  very 
Pr omits  appears  in  precisely  that  character, 
twisting  "  good  matin  "  out  of  "  good  morning," 
and  "good  soir  "  out  of  "good  evening,"  and 
up  to  every  variety  of  verbal  prestidigitation ! 
Then  we  come  upon  "  Bacon  without  humor ; 
Shakespeare's    smiling   lips    the    mouthpiece    of 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  63 

humor  for  all  human  kind."  Bacon  without 
humor !  In  the  name  of  Momus,  Comus,  and 
Pantagruel,  what  Bacon  did  Mr.  White  read 
about  !  His  oratory  was  "  nobly  censorious," 
says  Ben  Jonson,  "  when  he  could  spare  or 
pass  by  a  jest."  "  He  was  abundantly  face- 
tious, which  took  much  with  the  queen,"  says 
his  contemporary,  Sir  Robert  Naunton.  Bacon 
without  humor !  He  goes  into  an  Elizabethan 
garden,  where  there  is  a  great  number  of  nude 
statues,  throws  up  his  hands,  and  exclaims,  "  The 
resurrection  !  "  "I  wish  your  Lordship  a  good 
Easter,"  says  the  Spanish  Jew,  Gondomar,  about 
to  cross  the  Channel.  "  I  wish  you  a  good  Pass- 
over," replies  Bacon.  There  is  no  better  jest  in 
Shakespeare  !  In  fact.  Bacon's  humor,  as  Ben 
Jonson  notes,  was  absolutely  predominant  in  his 
intellectual  make-up.  I  have  a  mind  to  step 
over  the  reviewer's  next  hop-scotch  square ;  its 
discrimination  of  Shakespeare  from  Bacon,  as 
poet  by  accident  and  muck-rake  by  design,  is  so 
silly  and  contemptible.  It  is  enough  to  say  of 
it  that  the  evidence  of  noble  and  massive  moral 
purpose  in  the  Shakespeare  drama  is  too  deci- 
sive to  comport  with  his  assertion  that  its  author 
wrote  it  only  for  the  sake  of  "  giving  pleasure 
to  others  and  getting  money  for  himself."  Did 
Mr.  White  expect  us  to  believe  that  we  owe  the 
creation  of  Hamlet  to  the  animus  of  Barnum  ? 
Next  we  have  a  Bacon  set  in  opposition  to 
Shakespeare  as  habitually  "  shrinking  from  gen- 


64  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

eralization."     What,  pray,  are  the  aphorisms  of 
the  Nomim   Orrjanum.  ?     We  land  at  the  New 
Atlantis,  —  we  look  down  those  illimitable  ave- 
nues of  Bensalem,  —  we  gaze  upon  those  shining 
facades,  those  rich  sculptures,  those  glorious  and 
stupendous  piles,  those  long  arrays  of  magnifi- 
cent generalizations;    and  our  dapper   cicerone, 
Sisfnor  Bianco,  informs    us    that    this  architect 
never  generalized  !     His  succeeding  description 
of  Shakespeare  as  a  synthesist,  and  Bacon  as  only 
an   analyst,  is  worthy  of  the  same  guide.     As 
if  the  Novum  Organum  were  not  a  creation, 
—  as  if  those  cloud-capt  towers,  those  gorgeous 
palaces,  those  solemn  temples,  looming  over  the 
future  of   mankind,  were   not  a  work  to  stand 
with  the  cathedrals  and  the  pyramids  forever  ! 
Next  we  have  Bacon,  "  a  highly  trained  mind," 
and  Shakespeare  "  wholly  untrained ;  "    this   in 
the  face  of   Ben  Jonson's   signal  panegyric  on 
Shakespeare's    mastership    in    poetic    "  art "    as 
something  distinctly  apart  from  his  natural  en- 
dowment (see  the  prologue  to  the  first  folio) ; 
his  declaration  that  as  a  poet  he  was  "  made  as 
well  as  born  ; "    his  express  testimony  that  his 
"  living  line  "  came  as  much  through  discipline 
and  culture  as  through  genius  ;  his  especial  glo- 
rification of  the  work  as  an  army  of  Knowledge 
advancing  against  Ignorance ;  this  in  the  face, 
too,  of    the   fact  that  his  "wholly  untrained" 
mind    shows   in   his  drama  all  that  universities 
were  built  to  confer,  —  the  drilled  proficiency  in 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  65 

all  the  learning  of  the  time,  whatever  its  defects 
or  limitations,  and  in  all  its  varieties,  including 
law  !      "  Wholly   untrained,"    indeed  !      Go    to, 
now  !  let  the  Baconian  smile  !    Let  him  relax  the 
zygomatic  muscle  !     Nor  will  his  face  grow  less 
like    the    mask    of   antique  Comedy  under   Mr. 
White's  closing  parallel,  in  which  Bacon  is  ex- 
hibited as   "  utterly  without   the  poetic   faculty 
even  in  a  secondary  degree,"  while  Shakespeare 
rises   "  with    unconscious    effort  to   the    highest 
heaven   of   poetry  ever  reached    by  the  human 
mind !  "     Bacon  utterly  without  the  poetic  fac- 
ulty !     One  remembers  such  a  sentence  as  this  : 
"  There    is    no    exquisite    beauty   without    soipe 
strangeness    in    its    proportions."       Or    as    that 
upon    the    prehistoric    origin    of    the    Hellenic 
myths,  in  which  Bacon  calls  them  "  sacred  rel- 
ics, —  gentle  whispers  and  the  breath  of  better 
times,  which  from  the  traditions  of  more  ancient 
nations  came  at  length  into  the  flutes  and  trum- 
pets of  the  Greeks."     Or  as  this  from  the  second 
essay  on  Death,  solemn,  dark,  and  consoling  in 
thouirht  and  cadence  as  the  music  of  a  Greg-o- 
rian  chant :  "  Death  arrives  gracious  to  such  as 
sit  in  darkness,  or  lie  heavy-burdened  with  grief 
and  irons  ;  to  the  poor  Christian  that  sits  bound 
in    the    galley ;    to    despairful    widows,    pensive 
prisoners,  and  deposed    kings ;    to    them  whose 
fortune  runs    back,  and  whose    spirits    mutiny ; 
unto  such  death  is  a  redeemer,  and  the  grave  a 
place  for  retiredness  and  rest."     But  why  mul- 


66  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

tiply  instances  in  rebuttal  ?  The  charge  is  best 
met  by  the  vast  crescent  smile  it  evokes  upon 
the  visajje  of  the  student  of  Verulam,  And 
when  one  thinks  of  the  mighty  imagination  of 
Bacon  ;  of  that  rich  prose,  surcharged  with  ide- 
ality, flowering,  despite  its  themes,  into  Shake- 
spearean loveliness  ;  above  all,  when  one  thinks 
of  the  great  upper  region  to  which  the  spirit  is 
caught  luider  the  spell  of  those  transcendent 
aphorisms  of  the  Organmn,  it  would  be  hard 
indeed  not  to  let  one's  face  become  like  a  French 
pierrofs  to  see  such  an  author  set  down  as  "  ut- 
terly without  the  poetic  faculty  even  in  a  sec- 
ondary degree  !  "  Far  different  is  the  note 
sounded  by  a  critic  who  ranks  Mr.  White  in 
every  particular,  including  knowledge  of  the 
mental  constitution  of  the  man  he  is  writing 
about.  I  ask  attention  to  the  followino-  mas- 
terly  passage  from  Taine's  incomparable  History 
of  English  Literature  :  — 

Among  this  band  of  scholars,  philosophers,  and  dreamers  is 
Francis  Bacon,  a  great  and  luminous  intellect,  one  of  the  finest 
of  this  poetic  progeny,  who  like  his  predecessors,  was  naturally- 
disposed  to  clothe  his  ideas  in  the  most  splendid  garb  ; —  in  this 
age  a  thought  did  not  seem  complete  until  it  had  received  form 
and  color.  But  what  distinguishes  him  from  the  others  is,  that 
with  him  an  image  only  serves  to  concentrate  meditation.  He 
reflected  long,  stamped  on  his  mind  all  the  parts  and  joints  of 
his  subject,  and  then,  instead  of  dissipating  his  complete  idea  in  a 
graduated  chain  of  reasoning,  he  embodies  it  in  a  comparison  so 
expressive,  exact,  transparent,  that  behind  his  figure  we  perceive 
all  the  details  of  the  idea,  like  a  liquor  in  a  fair  crystal  vase. 

This  is  his  mode  of  thought,  by  symbols,  not  by  analysis  ; 
instead  of  explaining  Jiis  idea,  he  transposes  and  translates  it  — 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  67 

translates  it  entire  to  the  smallest  details,  closing  all  in  the  maj- 
esty of  a  grand  period,  or  in  the  brevity  of  a  striking  sentence. 
Thence  springs  a  style  of  admirable  richness,  gravity,  and  vigor, 
now  solemn  and  symmetrical,  now  concise  and  piercing,  always 
elaborate  and  full  of  color. 

Thence  is  derived  also  his  manner  of  conceivmg  of  things. 
He  is  not  a  dialectician,  like  Hobbes  or  Descartes,  apt  in  ar- 
ransrins-  ideas,  in  educing  one  from  another,  in  leading  his  reader 
from  the  simple  to  the  complex  by  an  unbroken  chain.  Tlie 
matter  being  explored,  he  says  to  us  :  "  Such  it  is  ;  touch  it  not 
on  that  side,  it  must  be  approached  from  the  other."  Nothing 
more  ;  no  proof,  no  effort  to  convince  ;  he  affirms  and  does  noth- 
ing more  ;  he  has  thought  in  the  manner  of  artists  and  poets,  and 
he  speaks  after  the  manner  of  prophets  and  seers.  "  Cogita  et  Visa," 
this  title  of  one  of  his  books,  might  be  the  title  of  all.  The 
most  admirable,  the  "'  Novum  Organum,"  is  a  string  of  aphorisms 

—  a  collection,  as  it  were,  of  scientific  decrees,  as  of  an  oracle 
who  foresees  the  future  and  reveals  the  truth.  And  to  make 
the  resemblance  complete,  he  expresses  them  by  poetical  figures, 
by  enigmatic  abbreviations,  almost  by  Sibylline  verses.  Shake- 
speare and  the  seers  do  not  contain  more  vigorous  and  expres- 
sive condensations  of  thought,  more  resembling  inspiration,  and 
in  Bacon  they  are  to  be  found  everywhere. 

It  will  be  seen  from  this  magnificent  passage, 
that  Taine  does  not  set  Bacon  so  very  widely 
apart  from  Shakespeare  in  the  nature  of  his  mind 

—  indeed,  one  might  almost  think  he  was  con- 
siderino;  the  two  as  one.  It  will  also  be  seen 
that  he  does  not  sustain  Mr.  White  at  all  in  re- 
gard to  Bacon's  "  poetic  faculty."  The  truth  is 
that  despite  his  reputation  as  a  textual  scholar, 
Mr.  Richard  Grant  White  kne.w  very  little  about 
either  Bacon  or  Shakespeare,  a  fact  of  which  his 
parallel  furnishes  decisive  evidence.  The  cap- 
stone of  his  absurdity  in  the  article  is  the  con- 
clusion, where  he  exalts  the  "  untaught  son  of 


68  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

the  Stratford  yeoman  "  as  a  "  miraculous  miracle 
that  does  not  defy  or  suspend  the  laws  of  na- 
ture." "  A  miraculous  miracle  "  is  rather  tauto- 
logical tautology,  especially  for  a  purist  in  words, 
as  Mr.  White  was.  Could  a  phrase  more  witless 
well  be  imagined  ?  —  complacently  offered,  too, 
as  the  solution  of  the  Shakespeare  anomalies ! 

The  solution,  however,  is  one  which  will  hardly 
be  accepted.  In  this  age,  we  believe  in  no  mira- 
cles outside  of  religion,  especially  miraculous 
miracles.  Despite  the  strenuous  efforts  of  certain 
fair-minded  gentlemen  to  choke  off  debate,  the 
question  of  the  authorship  of  the  Shakespeare 
drama  is  at  length  squarely  mooted.  On  this 
question,  Francis  Bacon  at  last  fronts  William 
Shakespeare,  and  let  the  Shakespeareans  ignore 
the  fact  as  they  may,  there  is  a  growing  public 
conviction  that  the  master  of  Gorhambury  fills 
the  bill.  In  him  the  Shakespearean  conditions 
are  felt  to  be  fairly  met.  His  great  personal 
beauty  in  youth,  his  beauty  and  majesty  in  age, 
make  him,  at  the  very  outset,  the  Orlando  con- 
taining Prospero  we  would  wish  to  know  was  the 
true  Shakespeare.  The  broad  tranquil  brow, 
the  mane  of  soft  dark  hair,  the  sweet  jesting 
mouth  and  living  eyes,  the  pure  May  bloom,  the 
love,  the  kindness,  the  woman's  subtle  wisdom 
and  brooding  masculine  power  of  the  young 
Verulam  of  tbe  Hilyard  miniature,  are  linea- 
ments of  the  kindred  charm  that  draws  us  in 
that  earlier  work,  so  gay,  so  good,  so  deep  —  the 


HAMLET'S  NOTE- BOOK.  69 

As  You  Like  It,  the  Twelfth  Night,  the  Mid- 
summer Night's  Dream ;  while  the  Coriola- 
nus,  the  Julius  Ccesar,  the  Othello,  the  Mac- 
beth, the  Tem^pest,  and  all  those  powerful  tab- 
leaux of  history  and  passion  which  belong  to 
later  years,  fall  no  less  into  natural  relation 
with  that  lofty  and  gracious  presence,  which 
even  his  contemporary,  the  sour-eyed  cynic,  Os- 
borne, who  looked  on  few  persons  or  thing's 
with  favor,  says  "  struck  all  men  with  an  awful 
reverence."  That  presence  is  felt  alike  in  the 
Tempest  and  in  the  Novum  Organum,  and  in 
both  cases,  so  strong-  is  our  impression  of  the 
moral  and  intellectual  elevation  of  the  author, 
it  is  a  presence  that  would  seem  to  be  less  Avithin 
the  sphere  of  the  creation,  than  presiding  over  it. 
It  is  true  of  Bacon,  what  Charles  Emerson  so 
finely  said  of  Shakespeare,  "  he  sits  above  the 
hundred-handed  play  of  his  imagination,  pensive 
and  conscious."  In  him  are  combined  the  splen- 
dor of  genius,  the  grandeur  of  spirit,  the  wealth 
of  learning,  the  variety  of  experience  we  natu- 
rally require  as  correlative  to  the  Shakespeare 
plays.  He  has  comprehended  the  globe  and 
the  world  —  nature  and  men  ;  he  has  had  the 
strength  of  soul  to  rise  in  his  survey  to  the 
height  universal ;  he  has  fed  on  the  lion's  mar- 
row of  the  great  books  of  all  ages ;  he  has  been 
everywhere ;  he  has  seen  everything.  He  knows 
England.  He  has  lived  in  Paris,  where  the 
continental  streams   meet.      He  has  visited  the 


70  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

French  provinces.  He  has  been  to  Rome,  then 
the  mtellectual  centre  of  Europe,  and  he  has 
travelled  long*  in  Italy.  He  has  had  the  oppor- 
tunities for  that  intimate  foreign  knowledge, 
which  in  the  Shakespeare  plays  reached  even, 
as  Armitage  Brown  shows,  to  acquaintance  with 
the  local  law  of  French  and  Italian  towns.  He 
has  been  a  great  lawyer,  so  great,  so  steeped  in 
the  lore  of  law,  that  his  contemporary  Harvey 
flings  at  him  that  "  he  writes  philosoj)hy  lilie  a 
Lord  Chancellor,"  —  meaning  that  his  legal 
training  appears  in  his  other  work,  which  is  true, 
too,  of  the  Shakespeare  drama,  where  the  vast 
and  accurate  knowledge  of  law,  and  still  more 
significant,  the  strange  bias  toward  the  law  for 
allusions  and  images,  are  even  more  apparent. 
He  has  had  the  view-point  for  strange  insights. 
He  has  seen,  as  the  Stratford  burgher  might  have 
seen,  a  man's  heart,  torn  from  his  living  breast 
by  the  executioner  and  flung  into  the  fire,  leap 
into  the  air  and  fall  back  into  the  flames ;  but 
he  has  looked  upon  sights  more  reserved  and  ter- 
rible —  he  has  gazed  into  the  bosoms  of  kings, 
the  minds  of  statesmen,  the  lives  of  nobles,  the 
smug  and  accepted  hells  of  morals  and  politics, 
against  which  his  whole  instauration  is  a  divine 
conspiracy.  He  has  been  the  companion  and 
counsellor  of  princes  ;  he  has  seen  the  ways  and 
learned  the  language  of  actors,  sailors,  gypsies, 
tinkers,  grooms,  as  w^ell.  He  has  been  clairvoy- 
ant of  everything  —  the  men,  the  elements,  the 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  71 

birds,  the  beasts,  the  insects ;  modes,  substances, 
dreams,  sympathies,  forces ;  all  that  is,  does, 
seems,  moves,  operates.  Read  his  Sylva  Syl- 
varwn.  He  has  suffered.  He  has  had  the  ex- 
perience of  the  Elizabethan  and  the  human  suf- 
fering. For  many  years  he  was  followed  by 
disaster.  He  has  felt  the  whips  and  scorns  of 
time,  the  wrong  done  by  the  oppressor,  the  con- 
tumely thrown  upon  the  poor  man  by  the  proud, 
the  pangs  of  love  disprized,  the  law's  delay,  the 
insolence  of  officials,  the  spurns  patient  merit  has 
to  bear  even  from  the  most  unworthy.  He  has 
drank  deep  of  life,  and  all  its  sorrow  and  its  joy. 
Withal,  he  is  a  poet — such  by  his  own  jesting 
confession,  and  by  vague  tacit  general  under- 
standing. He  speaks  of  himself  in  his  letter  to 
Sir  John  Davies  as  a  "  concealed  poet."  He  is 
described  by  a  contemporary  poet,  George  With- 
ers, as  "  Lord  Chancellor  of  Parnassus  "  —  Par- 
nassus, the  mount  of  poetry  !  Sir  Tobie  Matthew, 
writing  to  him  from  Paris,  probably  in  reference 
to  some  of  those  secret  "  works  of  my  recreation  " 
Bacon  was  fond  of  sending  him  in  manuscript, 
gayly  says  he  "  will  not  promise  to  return  him 
weight  for  weight,  but  Measure  for  Measure." 
Ben  Jonson,  who  was  in  his  secrets  and  knew 
all  about  him,  giving  in  his  Discoveries  an  ac- 
count of  the  leading  orators,  wi-iters,  and  poets 
of  the  time  in  England  (and  never  mentioning 
Shakespeare),  puts  him  above  all  as  "  the  mark 
and  acme  of  our  language,"  and  says  it  "  is  he 


72  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

that  hath  filled  up  all  numbers  " —  take  notice  ! 
—  all  numbers  !  —  "  and  performed  that  in  our 
tongue  which  may  be  compared  or  preferred 
either  to  insolent  Greece  or  haughty  Rome." 
Clearly,  an  Olympian  man. 

On  the  other  hand,  we  have  William  Shake- 
speare. The  tinted  Stratford  bust,  which  so 
great  a  sculptor  as  Chantrey  scrutinized  and 
thought  taken  from  a  death-mask,  shows  us  how 
he  looked.  A  fat  fellow,  sturdy,  comely,  fresh- 
colored,  blobber-cheeked,  no  neck,  a  mouth  full 
of  tongue,  a  ten-per-center's  forehead,  the  fun- 
niest perky  little  nose,  a  length  of  upper  lip 
which  is  a  deformity,  and  on  it  two  droll  little 
flat  curls  of  moustache,  supplemented  by  a  short 
point  of  imperial  on  the  chin.  Lavater,  pausing 
before  the  effigy  with  the  Shakespeare  volume 
in  his  hand,  would  say :  "  That  never  wrote 
this  !  "  Such  was  his  appearance.  For  an  ac- 
count of  his  actions,  we  are  indebted  to  the  pain- 
ful diligence  of  the  Shakespeare  Society.  Par- 
turient montes.  The  historical  mountain  has 
labored  and  produced  the  biographical  mouse. 
The  child  of  low  degree  ;  born  and  brought  up  at 
Stratford,  then,  as  Halliwell-Phillips  has  shown, 
one  of  the  meanest  and  filthiest  towns  in  Eng- 
land ;  butcher's  boy,  poacher,  link-boy,  horse-boy, 
play-actor,  theatrical  manager  ;  such  up  to  middle 
life  is  his  record.  He  amassed  wealth,  probably 
like  his  fellow  actor,  Edward  Alley n,  by  money- 
lending  and  shrewd  speculating  ;  eventually  re- 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  73 

tired  to  Stratford  ;  bought  the  best  house ;  and 
lived  with  au  income  of  at  least  twenty  thousand 
dollars  a  year,  present  values.  He  had  a  keen 
eye  to  the  main  chance,  and  sued  for  and  re- 
covered money  owed  him.  He  had  three  chil- 
dren, whom  he  brought  up  in  complete  igno- 
rance ;  his  daughter  Judith  could  not  even  sign 
her  name.  He  produced  no  plays  at  Stratford, 
but  he  continued  the  tradition  of  his  grand  come- 
dies, as  follows  :  — 

Epitaph  on  Tom-a-Combe,  otherwise  Thinbeard. 
Thin  ill  beard  and  thick  in  purse, 
Never  man  beloved  worse  ; 
He  went  to  the  grave  with  many  a  curse  ; 
The  Devil  and  he  had  both  one  nurse. 

There  is  also  the  Attic  morceau,  as  poor  Miss 
Bacon  called  it,  on  John  -  a  -  Combe,  done  in 
the  broad  Warwickshire  brogue,  as  the  point 
shows :  — 

Epitaph  on  John-a-Combe,  a  covetous  rich  man. 
Ten  in  the  hundred  lies  here  engraved ; 
'T  is  a  hundred  to  ten  his  soul  is  not  saved; 
If  any  one  asks,  "  Who  lies  in  this  tomb  ?  " 
Ho  !  ho  !  quoth  the  Devil,  "  't  is  my  John-a-Combe  ! " 

[John  ha'  coom  :  John  has  come.] 

The  power  that  had  produced  the  great  trage- 
dies, as  creation  puts  forth  worlds,  Thnon,  Cym- 
hel'uie,  Lear,  Antony  and  CleojKdra,  Othello, 
clearly  survived  in  the  more  serious  effusions  of 
his  muse.     For  example  :  — 

Epitaph  on  Elias  James. 
When  God  was  pleased,  the  world  unwilling  yet, 
Elias  James  to  nature  paid  his  debt. 


74  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

And  here  reposeth  ;  as  he  lived,  he  died  ; 

The  saying  in  him  strongly  verified  — 

Such  life,  such  death  ;  then  the  known  truth  to  tell. 

He  lived  a  godly  life  and  died  as  well. 

Another  instance  :  — 

Epitaph  on  Sir  Thomas  Stanley. 
Ask  who  lies  here  but  do  not  weep  ; 
He  is  not  dead,  he  doth  but  sleep  ; 
This  stony  register  is  for  his  bones, 
His  fame  is  more  perpetual  than  tliese  stones, 
And  his  own  goodness  with  himself  being  gone, 
Shall  live  when  earthly  monument  is  none. 

Not  monumental  stone  preserves  our  fame, 

Nor  sky-aspiring  pyramid  our  name  ; 

The  memory  of  him  for  whom  this  stands 

Shall  outlive  marble  and  defacer's  hands  ; 

When  all  to  Time's  consumption  shall  be  given, 

Stanley  for  whom  this  stands  shall  stand  in  Heaven. 

This  poetry  is  from  the  same  source  whence 
flowed,  in  sombre  sweetness,  the  grand,  the 
dark  and  melancholy  stream  of  Hamlet ! 

In  the  intervals  of  producing  these  gems,  of 
which  there  are  a  number,  their  author  lived  a 
profane  and  vulgar  life,  as  Emerson  justly  calls 
it.  Even  tradition  fails  to  give  the  least  sparkle 
of  spirituality,  the  least  sign  of  moral  elevation, 
to  those  years  of  opulence  at  Stratford,  as  to  the 
years  before  them.  His  most  notable  act  was  to 
obtain  on  two  occasions  by  flagrant  fraud,  with 
the  complicity  of  the  Garter  King  of  Arms,  a 
gross  rascal,  named  John  Dethick,  a  grant  of 
armorial  bearings  to  which  he  had  no  right 
whatever ;    a   transaction    which    caused    bitter 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  75 

complaint  against  the  management  of  the  Her- 
ald's College,  although  it  refused  to  confirm 
Dethick's  action  in  both  instances.  For  the  rest, 
he  ate,  drank,  caroused,  slept ;  he  speculated  in 
tithes,  in  land,  and  steadily  fattened.  He  never 
published  his  plays,  nor  made  any  claim  to  their 
authorship,  then  or  at  any  time.  Mr.  White 
has  the  efl'rontery  to  say  in  the  article,  that  in 
his  lifetime  he  claimed  them  as  his.  He  never 
at  any  time  made  the  faintest  claim  to  then-  au- 
thorship ;  never  !  He  never  set  up  any  title  to 
them,  and  they  were  first  published  in  collected 
form,  affiliated  upon  his  name,  seven  years  after 
his  death,  in  1623,  the  same  time  in  which  Bacon 
was  collecting  and  pubUshing  his  works  in  their 
final  form  for  posterity.  He  had  no  books.  His 
will  shows  the  fact.  He  leaves  houses,  lands, 
messuages,  orchards,  gardens,  wearing-apparel, 
furniture,  a  sword,  a  silver  and  gilt  punch-bowl, 
a  second-best  bed  for  his  wife,  —  no  books.  He 
had  twenty  thousand  dollars  a  year  and  not 
a  volume.  The  man  who  wrote  Love's  Laho?^  \s 
Lost,  so  learned,  so  academic,  so  scholastic  in 
expression  and  allusion  that  it  is  unfit  for  pop- 
ular representation, — the  man  whose  ample  page 
is  rich  with  the  transfigured  spoils  of  ages,  —  that 
man  lived  without  a  library !  Finally,  in  1616, 
he  died  of  a  fever,  the  result  of  a  drunken  orgy 
at  Stratford  with  some  congenial  tosspots.  This, 
in  brief,  is  his  record  ;  a  record  unadorned  by  a 
single  excellence  or  virtue.     Before  it,  thought- 


76  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

fill  men  stand  in  utter  perplexity.  Hallam,  an 
elegant  and  judicious  mind,  regards  it  with  petu- 
lant disquietude.  Guizot,  a  profound  and  pene- 
trating intellect,  notes  it  with  a  certain  mystified 
curiosity.  Coleridge  recoils  from  it  with  anger 
and  disgust,  and  declares  that  such  a  creature 
could  not  have  written  the  drama.  "  Does  God 
choose  idiots  to  convey  truths  to  man  !  "  he  cries 
with  indignation.  You  would  say  that  he  glared 
at  the  indisjjutable  biography,  enraged  that  it 
does  not  offer  one  single  point  of  correspondence, 
however  small,  with  the  spirit  of  the  plays. 

Such  are  the  two  men.  Bacon  and  Shake- 
speare, who  appear  in  connection  with  a  ques- 
tion of  authorship  which  is  in  fact  an  enigma. 
The  first  belongs  to  the  drama  as  though  he 
were  one  of  its  lordliest  characters  ;  the  second, 
by  every  fact  know^n  of  him,  is  a  grotesque 
anomaly.  So  little  can  this  be  denied  that  men 
are  driven,  like  Mr.  White,  to  explain  the  pal- 
pable Shakespearean  incongruity  by  the  assertion 
of   "  miraculous  miracle." 

Enough.  But  after  what  has  been  said,  it  is 
hoped  that  Mr.  White's  review  will  not  continue 
to  impose  upon  guileless  readers,  nor  to  wreak 
further  mischief  upon  a  volume  which  is  a  lasting 
monument  to  the  patient  labor,  the  clear-sighted 
scholarship,  and  the  genius  of  its  editor  and 
author.  Had  Mrs.  Pott  been  less  thorough  and 
faithful,  she  could  have  produced  a  work  which 
would    have   been    simply  invincible.     She    has 


HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK.  77 

chosen  to  present  Bacon's  manuscript  entire,  and 
to  append  to  its  members  all  the  varieties  of 
illustrations  which  the  Shakespeare  pages  af- 
ford ;  some  of  the  connections  being  thus  most 
readily  appreciable  by  the  philologist,  the  gram- 
marian, or  the  connoisseur  of  style ;  some  also 
being  shadowy,  recondite,  and  indirect,  and  be- 
coming apparent  mainly  by  operations  of  rea- 
soning, circuitous  and  subtle  like  Bacon's  own. 
Her  book  has  consequently  been  relegated  to  the 
consideration  of  students  rather  than  readers, 
and  its  success,  which  might  have  been  imme- 
diate, has  become  an  affair  of  years  instead  of 
hours.  Had  she  chosen  rather  to  make  a  se- 
lection from  the  Promus  of  the  considerable 
mass  of  entries  and  illustrations,  similar  to  those 
I  have  cited  on  an  early  page,  where  the  relation 
or  identity  is  obvious  and  indisputable,  she 
would  have  been  less  just  to  her  subject  in  its 
totalitv,  but  her  book  would  have  carried  instant 
and  irresistible  conviction.  As  it  is,  it  will  be 
sure  to  make  its  way.  The  time  is  rapidly  com- 
ing when  literary  bladders  and  persifleurs  will 
not  be  able  on  the  Bacon-Shakespeare  question 
to  make  a  mock  of  evidence,  as  Mr.  White  did 
in  his  insolent  review.  If  opportunity  favored, 
I  should  like  to  point  out  in  detail  the  singular 
value  and  significance  of  the  Promus  as  a  doc- 
ument in  an  extraordinary  jDroblem,  the  solu- 
tion of  which  probably  involves  the  reintegration 
of  a  great  though  dismembered  philosophy,  the 


78  HAMLET'S  NOTE-BOOK. 

ideiitilication  with  it  of  works  that  wander  half 
unknown  and  only  partly  understood  because  of 
their  present  disconnection,  and  the  opening  of 
some  of  the  g'reat  secret  books  of  that  asre  and 
the  preceding  European  ages.  It  is  a  work 
which  no  student  of  Shakespeare  or  Bacon  can 
afford  to  turn  from,  and  it  is  the  crowning  error 
of  any  literary  bigot's  life  if  he  imagines  that  its 
force  can  be  broken  or  its  light  quenched  by  a 
shallow  and  brazen  commentary,  studded  with 
reckless  and  ridiculous  violations  of  text  and 
truth. 


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